Electronic ink is one of the technologies being researched today to replace the paper-and-ink method of printing reading materials. As of the present, there are two companies developing this technology and they're E-Ink and Xerox. The main components of this technology are cavities or microcapsules, the substance or ink enclosed in this capsule and the negatively charged pigmented balls or chips inside the capsules. These three components make possible the rearrangement of microcapsules on the "paper" upon command.

The digital book will contain ultra-thin plastic paper. This will be composed of cells much like those on a graphing paper; these cells will act much like the pixels on your computer screen. Each cell on the paper will be connected through embedded microelectronics that would create text or images using electric charges.

E-Ink Technology

The technology behind E-Ink's design for electronic ink relies on using 100-micron wide microcapsules each of which will contain hundreds of pigmented chips. The chips can be made to either float or sink on the blue-colored dye inside the microcapsule giving the impression of either a white or blue spot. Each page of the digital book will contain 100,000 microcapsules. Electric manipulation of these chips casing the microcapsule to appear as either white or dark blue in color will result in text and images.

Electronic Ink

Xerox Technology

Xerox, on the other hand, uses a two-colored microscopic ball suspended in oily rubber-like paper to produce the same effect. With the application of an electrical charge, the microscopic balls can either turn to display the light-colored part or the dark-colored spot to create the images or texts on the page.

The main obstacle in developing this technology has been the need to keep the electronic paper thin while wiring the pages to manipulate the microcapsules or the balls using an electrical charge. For this reason, E-Ink signed an agreement with Lucent technologies in order to be able to use the transistor design of Lucent in their electronic ink design. These tiny transistors will not only make it possible to create paper thin wired pages but will make possible the creation of multi-colored images and texts, too.

Applications of the Electronic Ink

Electronic ink or digital books will make it possible for readers to download a new book through the Internet upon finishing another. The digital book will then use the downloaded data to re align the microcapsules or colored balls on the wired pages which makes it possible for the user to read the story as if it were printed on a regular book. Furthermore, a memory chip located at the spine of the book will make it possible for the reader to choose from up to ten stories or books stored in his electronic device.

This technology will also revolutionize the newspaper industry in such a way that readers can download the daily news through their phones on their way to work and display this in the electronic newspaper by transferring the data from the phone to the device.