After several years of R & D, the electronic paper matures and could disrupt many industries, starting with the book or the Nearly 500 years after the invention of printing, the digital revolution attacks the paper and ink. After several years of R & D carried out by American companies as E-ink Toppan or European Philips, the market for electronic paper finally arrived at maturity. Developed since 1997 in the laboratories of the prestigious MIT near Boston, this type of screen is based on micro-capsules filled with black or white, whose presence on the visible part of the capsule is controlled by an electrical pulse. Flexible and very end, this type of screen offers a low

resolution of 170 PPI enough to read a text. In recent months, Sony markets the Liibrie, reading a terminal equipped with this type of screen. Sold about 300 dollars, the first product offer sufficient resolution to read a book, but is unable to replace an LCD screen. Industrialists Japanese and South Koreans are very interested in this technology and investment now heavily in these new screens, with the triple goal of improving the resolution, the advent of color and lower prices. In addition to the material issues, Japanese groups also deal with the problematic software in defining standards for the creation of e-Books and especially looking at the strategic issue of DRM to prevent piracy. On this ground, the Japanese groups are nevertheless competition from American publishers like Microsoft or Adobe, which also seek to make "metro" or "pdf" future formats e-Books. The electronic paper applications are numerous. In addition to the electronic book market, the e-Book (books, dictionaries, textbooks), already quite popular in the USA or Japan, this type of technology is enormously newspapers. In partnership with Hitachi, the strong daily Nikkei believes it can divide by 10 its costs associated with printing and distributing the paper and will soon launch a paper version of its electronic newspaper in Japan. But the electronic paper could also revolutionize the packaging industry, with intelligent packaging, or the display on the street, allowing viewers no longer manipulate glue or paper. With a manufacturing cost of a few dozen euros per sheet, which could be reduced to a half euros in case of mass production, low energy-and particularly flexible, electronic paper is complementary to LCDs or OLED, and should shake the whole "paper" whose impact on the environment has always been very critical of environmentalists. It remains to be seen whether the French world of publishing, often quite conservative, s'appropriera this new technology to lower the price of books and thus democratize access to culture for all.