Books Take Electronic Turn--Alex Hamilton

These technologies are pretty far along—electronic ink has already made its public debut, while Xerox and 3M are working to develop e-paper products for general release. While both technologies are now limited to monochrome output, developers are tackling the issue of color.

With electronic paper, it is possible to have matrixes of contrasting colors to render images in color. As with e-paper, the developers are now working on developing capsules that contain red, green and blue hues to render color images.