The Belgian Minister for Simplification, Vincent Van Quickenborne, wants to eliminate the requirements of drugs to pharmacists, the certificates for mutual care and medical certificates to employers. For 2011, Minister Van Quickenborne (Open VLD) plans to introduce electronic prescriptions and certificates, to avoid paper documents, says he in De Standaard and Het Nieuwsblad. "The electronification comprehensive health care represents a saving of 1, 5 billion," said the minister.
Why not carrying your prescriptions and cerificates with you on a eReader, within a secured your patient file ?
Today, I would like to point you to a real ePaper application : the eFlyBook.
"eFlyBook is a portable electronic device that contains all of the U.S. digitized terminal procedures, IFR high and low altitude enroute charts, U.S. airport facility directory, the FAR/AIM, and can accommodate other user installed eDocs such as books, newspapers, magazines, pictures, and many others. eFlyBook brings revolutionary technology right to your fingertips with impressive features such as an ample 8.1 inch display in a 1/2 inch thick, 13.7 oz device, with very low power consumption providing days of interaction, incredible document viewing capability, and so much more."
When you search on ePaper, you will find some really outdated websites. Look for example at http://www.epaper.org.uk/. It seems that some people had than jumped on their board to surf an ePaper wave that lasted too long to arrive.
I'm conscious that this market might take years before really taking off, but I'm confident it will eventually fly.
Yesterday, Apple released the iPad but I'm confident that ePaper will provide solutions with much lower energy consumption which will allow a competitive advantage. ePaper should provide a more stable and cheaper technology for long term consultation of eContent.
But it might take time : I'm ready to spend many years doing this on the side even if I'd prefer to have ePaper as primary activity :
Design/Architect innovative content production chains with ePaper as Preferred client
Develop the best integration software that couples the strongest platforms
Design for the best eReaders
Re-sell all or part of total ePaper solution (hardware, software, content and services)
Yesterday, Apple announced the iPad and this morning I had a look at the video on ZDNet.
It is a really cool device ! Let's comment on Steve Jobs's demonstration:
Graphics : just like on the iPhone/iPod, the system looks really great
Pictures : the iPad will become a great way to share photos
Internet : It's surely the best experience for browsing the web in your sofa, nevertheless if you want to write long texts (like blogging), I'm not sure yet.
Email : I don't believe in it yet. I'd need to test the virtual keyboard to see if it's convenient to write an email like this
Reading eBooks : I'd need to compare reading during 1 hour on ePaper and 1 hour on a iPad.
The iPad will probably deeply hurt ePaper manufacturers. Their only chance of survival is a price war against the iPad. Also they will have to innovate aggressively to come nearby the same user experience. See an example here : http://vimeo.com/8217311. (Thanks to Michel Duperrier for sending me this video).
With Blio you don't need a special hardware device like an ePaper based reader to read eBooks, you just use your PC...
Engadget.com :
"...knfb's Blio [comes] with Mac and PC compatible software saying you don't need new fancy hardware to read the the printed page on a screen....or may be you do. Regardless, of where the Blio software ends up we really dig it and it approaches digital reading in a whole new way. In case you didn't know the Blio software aims to preserve the traditional book or magazine format by keeping its layout, fonts, images, but also to meld it with digital interactivity..."
On January 20th 2010, Amazon announced its new deal proposal: If you format your eBook for the Amazon Digital Text Platform - so people can read it on their Kindle - Amazon will give you upto 70% of the sale if you satisfy some conditions. You can read about those conditions in the press release. Any (United States) citizen can sign up for an account, upload and sell eBooks through Amazon.
