Comment by cryptonector 3 days ago
Ok, but huge textbooks with lots of ink colors and lots of diagrams that make them heavy, hard to carry, hard to read and use, and expensive?
Or textbooks like they used to be back in the 60s?
Yes, it's called "stone paper" or sometimes "rich mineral paper". It's a resin (typically high-density polyethylene) that's filled with, typically, calcite, with very high filler loadings up to 80%, then coated to provide the writing surface: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370899755_Biodegrad... https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1176...
This is causing problems in Australia (where the product is widely used) because confused people put the "stone paper" in the paper recycling, falsely believing it to be paper.
If you wanted to minimize the thickness, you'd probably want to change the formula in several ways:
- use a higher-strength plastic like polyimide;
- include some kind of high-strength fibrous, acicular, or platy reinforcing filler;
- use a more powerful opacifier than calcite, such as rutile, enabling you to use a lower filler loading and thinner layers.
Talc, mullite, fiberglass, and bentonite come to mind as candidate reinforcing fillers, and rutile microcrystals can also be grown in an acicular morphology.
If you really wanted to minimize the thickness and weight, maybe there's some way you could use metal instead of plastic.
Makes me wonder. Can't they make book pages out of thin, thin plastic now ? Lighter to carry ? Maybe annotatable (and erasable too) ?