Here's a thought to give you nightmares: what you say in your econtent is only part of the message people receive. The rest is metacontent—and believe me, you have less control over metacontent than you'd like.

I could provide loads of online examples, and maybe I will in a future column. For now, I'm going to look at an article from this magazine—Geoff Daily's "Epaper: the Flexible Electronic Display of the Future" [March 2005, pp. 36-41]. It provides a good overview of epaper and its potential for econtent; it is well-researched, with apt quotes from developers, forecasters, and gurus. While the article contains some conflicting information on the state of real-world applications, I'll stipulate that epaper will have worthwhile uses . . . but that's not the point.

Let's consider the metacontent: there's a photo illustrating Gyricon's epaper-based SyncroSigns "as mutable message boards in hallways." Great—except that the display pictured, presumably a poster-size board, is so low-rez that the biggest word could easily be read as "WELCONE" or maybe "UELCONE" or "UELCOME." Another m in the sign is nearly indistinguishable from the ns. That's bad enough. Worse: a similar photo appeared in the April 2004 EContent, with the same awful resolution. The metacontent delivered, true or not, is "Another year of development hasn't improved SyncroSigns from a nearly unreadable resolution."

Of Gyricon's SmartPaper, Daily writes, "Some retailers have implemented epaper price tags that can update prices dynamically through the store." Hmm. One market we shop at has had organic carrots priced at $1.99 a pound on the shelf tag for a year and $4.99 a pound in the computer. When we complain, they charge the shelf price. With epaper price tags, the computer would automatically change the shelf tag to match. As a consumer, this possibility does not give me warm fuzzies about epaper.

Outsell analyst Marc Strohlein believes that the future of epaper is a rich one because "People prefer rich media over just text." So much for books, magazines, newspapers—and, by the way, most econtent. "People"—a wonderful universal—want "rich content." I'm not sure what that means in the context of epaper, but either way Strohlein's just told off print (and many of our digital) EContent readers as being boring old text people.

Nick Bogaty of the Open eBook Forum, professionally committed to seeing ebooks replace print books completely or in part, offers a self-serving quote, albeit one that falls apart when you read it carefully: "The ebook market is at a spot now where we're going to see a big transition from how people are currently reading ebooks to how they're going to in the future." Most people aren't currently reading ebooks at all (ebooks represent less than 0.2% of the book market), so the big transition may not mean much.

Anyone who cares about the environment will gather unintended metacontent from the section on E-Ink's partnership with Plastic Logic to manufacture epaper by 2007 cheaply enough to act as a disposable display. Says E-Ink's Darren Bischoff, "If you're talking about something that's blinking on a cereal box, those are things that could be based on very simple electronics and that could be seen in the next three to five years." If you're an advertiser looking for ways to intrude into more of people's everyday lives, that may sound great. If you're a breakfast eater, the thought of your cereal box blinking messages at you might be less wonderful—but you can stash the bloody billboard in your cupboard so it blinks at the olive oil. That's not the big problem. Right now, when I finish a box of cereal, I shake out the last bits, rip open the seams, flatten the box, and add it to the paper/cardboard side of our recycling bin. But not with that thin plastic sheet—particularly not since there's only one way that sheet can be blinking ads at me: a battery. Now we have plastic, probably metal, and possibly toxic substances. The best I can do is add the box to the garbage, going to a landfill. The worst: it's a low-level hazardous substance (as are NiCad and some other batteries), and I need to find some safe way to dispose of it. What a wonderful innovation . . . or not.

The following sentence communicates loads of metacontent about John Blossom's expertise in matters concerning meaning in the English language: "In general, content is moving toward the proliferation of contextualized content objects that are most easily monetized when they flow into the venue where their value is most easily recognized by very specific audiences."

Strohlein seems positively cheerful about a future in which advertising is "embedded into our environment," and is doing everything in his power to help make it happen. My reaction: Run for the hills. Epaper is coming to insinuate ads into everything. The not so metacontent here? Beware of metacontent: the messages we read that you didn't intend to send come through loud and clear.