By Joe Jacobson, Co-Founder of E Ink,  Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, Molecular Machines Group, MIT & Felix Ho, Chairman, E Ink Corporation

“As a young graduate student I had the opportunity to travel extensively throughout the globe and meet many people. On one memorable trip to a remote town in Peru I met an amazing young student who had never been more than a few miles from home.  He had notebooks and notebooks of extraordinary aeronautical designs.  Everything he had learned came from the one book on aeronautical engineering that his very modest town library had. His sole request to us was to please send him more books on aeronautical design. There are many examples like this, such as the famous Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who, starting at the age of 17, compiled some nearly 3900 highly original theorems in number theory starting with a single book that he had access to entitled A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure and Applied Mathematics by George S. Carr.

What if each kid on the planet had had access to the world’s library of books? That was the basic goal behind E Ink.  Could we develop a new display and manufacturing technology that could produce eReaders that had the look and feel of real paper, consumed almost no power and could be manufactured at sufficient cost and volume to put a library of congress into the hands of each kid on the planet?  The enabling concept behind E Ink was to create a new paradigm in manufacturing – manufacturing by printing or ‘printed electronics’ to meet those goals.

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