Electronic paper

Electronic paper emerged from a physicist's vision of the infinite book. In 1993, Joseph Jacobson was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford studying quantum mechanics when he conceived of a display that would mimic paper: readable in sunlight, requiring no backlight, consuming power only when the image changed. By 1995, Neil Gershenfeld had recruited Jacobson to MIT's Media Lab to pursue the idea.

The adjacent possible had aligned through decades of electrophoretic research. Since the 1970s, scientists knew that charged particles suspended in fluid could be moved by electric fields—electrophoresis. Xerox PARC had experimented with electrophoretic displays, but the particles clumped and degraded. What Jacobson and his undergraduate students JD Albert and Barrett Comiskey conceived was microencapsulation: trapping charged white particles and dark dye inside millions of tiny capsules that could be applied like ink.

The breakthrough came at 2 or 3 AM on January 23, 1997, in a windowless MIT basement laboratory. Albert and Comiskey placed a microcapsule between two copper electrodes on a microscope slide and applied an electric field. The white particles moved to one end of the capsule; the capsule appeared white. Reverse the field; the particles moved to the other end; the capsule appeared dark. They had achieved what materials scientists had declared impossible: controllable, stable switching in a microencapsulated electrophoretic system.

MIT filed the first patent in October 1996; a second followed in March 1997. Two months before Albert and Comiskey graduated, they founded E Ink Corporation with Jacobson, Jerome Rubin (co-founder of LexisNexis), and Russ Wilcox. The 1998 Nature paper announcing the technology made the cover—extraordinary for undergraduate work. Philips partnered with E Ink in 1999 to develop commercial applications.

The cascade from electronic paper transformed reading. Sony launched the first commercial e-reader using E Ink in 2004. Amazon's Kindle followed in 2007, Barnes & Noble's Nook in 2009. The technology's paper-like readability and week-long battery life made e-readers a distinct category from backlit tablets. By 2024, E Ink displays appeared on electronic shelf labels, bus station signs, and smartwatch faces—anywhere a static or slowly changing image needed to be visible without constant power.

Path dependence favored the microencapsulated electrophoretic approach over alternatives like electrochromic or cholesteric liquid crystal displays. E Ink's head start and Kindle's market dominance locked in the technology. Color e-paper remained challenging until 2020, when E Ink Kaleido displays achieved acceptable color gamuts for magazines and textbooks.

By 2026, electronic paper has not replaced LCD or OLED for video, but has created its own niche for reflective, low-power displays. The "Etch A Sketch for grown-ups," as Comiskey called it, fulfilled Jacobson's 1993 vision: a display that reads like paper because it works like paper—reflecting ambient light rather than emitting its own.