As for Gabriel's fate, the portal merged in summer 2005 with the European Library's website (created by CENL in January 2004) to offer a common portal for the 43 European national libraries. Europeana, the European digital library, was launched three years later, in November 2008, with two million documents. Europeana offered 6 million documents in March 2010, and 10 million documents on a revamped website in September 2010.
1997 > E INK, AN ELECTRONIC INK TECHNOLOGY
[Summary] In April 1997, researchers at the MIT Media Lab (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) founded the company E Ink to develop an electronic ink technology. Very briefly (and not so well) explained, the technology was the following one: caught between two sheets of flexible plastic, millions of micro-capsules, each of them containing black and white particles, are in suspension in a clear fluid. A positive or negative electric field indicates the desired group of particles on the surface, to view, modify or delete data. The first screen using this technology was available as a prototype in July 2002, and marketed in 2004. Other screens followed for various ebook readers (Librié, Sony Reader, Cybook, Kindle, Nook, etc.), as well as prototypes of flexible displays announcing the forthcoming electronic paper.
In April 1997, researchers at the MIT Media Lab (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) founded the company E Ink to develop an electronic ink technology.
The first screen using this technology was available as a prototype in July 2002, and marketed in 2004. Other screens followed for various ebook readers (Librié, Sony Reader, Cybook, Kindle, Nook, etc.), as well as prototypes of flexible displays announcing the forthcoming electronic paper.
As explained on the company's website: "Electronic ink is a proprietary material that is processed into a film for integration into electronic displays. Although revolutionary in concept, electronic ink is a straightforward fusion of chemistry, physics and electronics to create this new material. The principal components of electronic ink are millions of tiny microcapsules, about the diameter of a human hair. In one incarnation, each microcapsule contains positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles suspended in a clear fluid. When a negative electric field is applied, the white particles move to the top of the microcapsule where they become visible to the user. This makes the surface appear white at that spot. At the same time, an opposite electric field pulls the black particles to the bottom of the microcapsules where they are hidden. By reversing this process, the black particles appear at the top of the capsule, which now makes the surface appear dark at that spot. To form an E Ink electronic display, the ink is printed onto a sheet of plastic film that is laminated to a layer of circuitry. The circuitry forms a pattern of pixels that can then be controlled by a display driver. These microcapsules are suspended in a liquid 'carrier medium' allowing them to be printed using existing screen printing processes onto virtually any surface, including glass, plastic, fabric and even paper. Ultimately electronic ink will permit most any surface to become a display, bringing information out of the confines of traditional devices and into the world around us."