Box 1. Will flexible screens be the end of paperbacks?

The future of reading, according to Theresa Horner, director of e-book operations for the publisher Harper Collins, lies in neat electronic devices such as the Sony Librie she totes in her handbag. Although some bookworms might baulk at the thought of reading a novel on a screen, it might not be long before portable electronic books revolutionize the book world in the same way that Apple's iPod changed the music scene.

Almost any device can be used to read an e-book. Nick Bogaty, executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (formerly the Open e-Book Forum) in New York thinks that the "vast majority" of people reading e-books now are doing so on their PDAs or smartphones. The small, handheld devices that people use to organize their lives can act as useful stores for reference books, or hold novels that while away a long commute. Fans of this approach say they stop noticing the screen size when gripped by a good plot.

There are also devices that attempt to recreate a more familiar reading experience. Garth Conboy, president of eBook Technologies, recounts how his company's devices, which are like small tablet-PCs with simple page-turning buttons, are supplied to about 15,000 students at a military college loaded with their course material. This saves the college money in printing, and has the advantages of online material.

But the device that afficionados drool over is the Sony Librie. Launched in Japan in April last year, it is similar in size, shape and weight to a book, and is the first device to have a paper-like display.

The display uses technology developed by E Ink in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works by reflecting light, rather than emitting light like an LCD or LED screen. The pixels are microcapsules containing particles of black and white ink with opposite charge. An electric field pushes one or other colour to the surface, producing a print-like effect. The device only gobbles energy when the display is refreshed. So the lifetime of batteries in such an e-paper system is measured in page-turns, rather than hours.

And the future? It's likely to be flexible. In September, Philips unveiled the first working prototype of an e-reader with a rollable display, aimed not just at e-books, but also at news reading and Internet browsing. In the 'Concept Readius' a grey-scale screen measuring about 13 centimetres wide, again using E Ink technology, curls up inside a slimline packet measuring 10 6 2 cm.

It might be worth waiting for. "We plan to start our production by the end of 2006, so I anticipate products coming into the market in early 2007," says Hans Driessen, a spokesman for Philips.

Jenny Hogan