The E-Book to End All P-Books.

The present article focuses on belief that electronic books would end all printed books. The so called "book of the future," developed by researchers, will not be on a disk or a monitor but instead "printed" on bound leafable pages, with a memory to hold a number of different titles. It is a futuristic vision of a book composed of electronic ink, or e-ink, which can be applied to the page within instead of by a press. E-ink consists of microscopic spheres, each about 40 microns in diameter, that together form characters on a page. Each sphere is half black and half white, applied by the millions to paper and then flipped over electronically to either side to produce what looks like a traditional printed page. A reader would select a title displayed on the book's binding, and circuits in the spine would activate transparent electrodes in each page. Ideally, public-domain text could be downloaded from the Internet and the daily news could be accessed through newspaper companies.