Bend and stretch - Flexible electronic books to hit market soon

NewScientist - February 23, 2009, by Paul Marks
GADGET-makers have long promised us a flexible electronic book, but actually producing a robust, bendy screen has proved tough - until now.

Plastic Logic, a display technology company based in Cambridge, UK, says it will launch the first flexible electronic book in January.

The two most popular e-books on the market, the Sony Reader and Amazon Kindle, are paperback book-sized devices that use first-generation black and white electronic "ink" displays. These consist of a plastic sheet containing pixel-sized voids, each filled with black and white ink particles. Electric fields attract the ink to the top of these voids to display print. The problem is, the transistors that apply these electric fields sit on a layer of glass, making the displays fragile.

Plastic Logic says it has now perfected a way of printing polymer transistors onto a layer of bendy plastic - allowing the screens to flex and bounce. "Screen breakage is the number one complaint with today's e-reader technology. Our display can take a lot of rough and tumble," says Joe Eschbach of Plastic Logic.

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