The first example was a Silicon Valley company called ePAC that currently prints technical manuals for companies like Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. ePAC’s highly robotized technology prints and binds these elaborate books, on demand, in a matter of seconds. The technology makes sense for technical manuals since the content changes so often and the books don’t require large print runs. However, ePAC’s CEO Sasha Dobrovolsky was at ETRE looking for funding to extend that technology to the larger “trade book” publishing industry in the United States–the kind of books we buy at the mall.
“Sixty thousand new titles are published each year,” Dobrovolsky says, “and of that number perhaps a thousand sell in enough quantity to justify mass production.” Nonetheless, publishers print and then truck vast quantities of books from factory to warehouse to store–and when they go unsold, the stores return them. So the books are again trucked the other way, to be shredded, pulped and turned into new books. Clearly, large amounts of money are wasted that could support writers, improve marketing, and firm up the publishing industry’s shaky bottom line. Dobrovolsky would use his on-demand print technology for all titles with small print runs; bookstores would just order one or a few copies printed at a time. The result: a major reduction in transportation, warehousing and inventory costs for publishers.
Print on demand is hardly a new idea–many college textbooks, for example, are now customized to a professor’s specifications and printed in small runs for each class. And on-demand printing is getting to be extremely good: last year Xerox used an on-demand printer to produce a coffee-table photography book that even pleased the photographer. So it’s going to happen, but here’s the problem: the current supply chain, while it may not make economic sense, nonetheless works. All along the chain, there are businesses that one way or another make money under the current arrangement. ePAC’s challenge is overcoming the inertia and vested interests of a system that already works, if badly. But this is an idea that is destined to be part of everyday life sooner than later.
The second idea I saw at ETRE was more speculative: a programmable LCD price tag. TagCorp’s price tag would display a price on its tiny screen by interacting with a small chip that manufacturers put in each item. Far-fetched? Actually, such embedded radio pricing chips are already being developed as potential replacements for barcodes–no need for a clerk and a scanner: the customer just walks by the cash register and it “reads” the price chip in each item and rings up the total. Proponents even see a role for these tiny chips once the product has left the store–your frozen dinner could tell your microwave how long it needed to cook, for example. Some manufacturers believe they can get the price of these tiny chips well below a penny apiece.
TagCorp’s twist is to make those embedded chips readable by customers. With these smart price tags, the manager of a Gap outlet, for example, would be able to remotely reprice every garment in the store with a few keystrokes. None of this will happen before embedded price chips are well established–which will involve weaning the whole retail world off the barcode system it has just installed. So TagCorp’s LCD price tag not only needs to be developed, but it also requires the widespread adoption of another still unproven technology. Don’t expect to see LCD price tags at the mall for a few decades.
The third technology that caught my eye in Seville was both the most innovative and least likely to show up in real life anytime soon. HoloVizio is a true 3-D television display from an Hungarian company called Holografika–a technology so cool you just want to see it happen. The 3-D display looks like a normal twenty-five inch television monitor, except the changing images on screen-a human skull, a rib cage, a prototype automobile–appear to be truly 3-D, hanging in space behind the glass. As you move your head in front of the screen, the forward parts of the image block the pieces in the back. And unlike previous 3-D television technologies, you don’t have to wear funny goggles.
Similar work, on a smaller scale, is also being done at the MIT Media Lab, and these are clearly the first steps toward true three-dimensional television. The Holografika folk even promise a compatible 3-D television camera soon. But will it catch on? I’ve been watching various 3-D technologies for several decades now, and so far the concept is still firmly in the lab. Almost certainly, these kind of monitors will be useful in computer-aided design and architecture–you’ll be able to draw a building or automobile and then see it rendered in true 3-D.
Only after years of professional use will the price of such hardware decline enough to be a consumer product. And even then, content providers will have to agree to produce their material in the new format. So when will we have 3-D television in the living room? If it ever happens, it will be long after print-on-demand books are commonplace–and those new 3-D sets will probably have LCD price tags, too. In short: as a consumer product, this is far, far in the future. But maybe that’s just as well. After all, most of us are still saving up for high-definition television.
