For Paper Books Lovers: Will we see a self-reprintable book soon?

 

Progress are being made in the field of electronic ink that could rewrite different texts on the same sheet of paper. A novel metal ink made of small sheets of copper that can be used to write a functioning, flexible electric circuit on regular printer paper.

This could potentially enable reprinting the content of a book with a different content, effectively inserting an entire library into a single book, as opposed to an electronic device. Though there would be many hurdle to overcome to market such a device, and reclaiming the market shares already conquered by e-readers might prove an unassailable obstacle, so the potential that this invention will one day give rise to the self-reprintable book is dire. In addition, this process relies on copper as the main raw material for the ink. That is bad news, as copper supply worldwide is running low and this reflects on the price of that commodity, The growing scarcity of copper would defeat the purpose of driving down the cost of such self-reprintable book through mass-production, as is done with e-readers, since the price of the raw material is set to rise and keep rising as supply sources diminish.

This being said, it is heartwarming to see that research that would enable the advent of a self-reprintable book are still ou there, and it might be just  a question of time untill we will be able to combine the pleasure of holding a paper book with the freedom of accessing a limitless number of books without having to carry or store them.