by Bobby B. Paul

Created on: September 21, 2008   Last Updated: November 19, 2008

Up until very recently, books have fared the digital media revolution with little change. However, the cost of publishing has skyrocketed over the past years and an increasingly illiterate society has made book publishing a riskier venture. The publishing industry also has to face the reality that it's only a matter of time. The recording industry and the film industry have helped publishers to see the writing on the wall.

The book publishing industry has escaped much of the digital age due to the fact that books on computers just have not appealed to most readers. While the computer and the internet have all but replaced the phone book for reference material like looking up an address, extended reading on a computer is not enjoyable as reading a book. The screen lighting is unnatural and harsh on the eyes. LCD screens don't work well in sunlight and require excessive power to keep them running.

E-books on computers they lack the portability of a book. A notebook is heavy compared to your paperback. If you like to write notes along the book margins for studying purposes then a book on a computer misses the point. Overall, the benefit of a printed book for extended reading far exceeds an electronic book.

But one technology has made the E-book a much more appealing tool and may push the paperback into the digital age.

For the past 10 years, a technology born inside of MIT, called E-ink, has been moving steadily towards production use and now is available to the consumer. E-ink consists of microscopic capsules with two different colors of ink, a white ink and a darker colored ink. Apply a voltage to the capsule with a transistor and one or the other rises to the top. Giving you rich printed looking tex on a white background. Place enough of these inside a thin film, and you have a paper-like display that creates electronic pages with the look of regular paper. Since the capsules contain actual ink, the writing also looks like regular ink and not pixilated electronic text.

As an added bonus, once the charge is applied, the ink remains there without additional power requirements. This means that a single battery charge to E-ink could give you a week's worth of uninterrupted reading. That's a far cry from the four hours maximum you get from your notebook displays that require constant power to maintain a display.

The readers are thin, light and can fit inside your handbag like a normal book. They have the dimensions of an average paperback except that they are much thinner.

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