I’m reviewing the BeBook eBook reader at the moment, and it’s already wound me up – after just an hour’s use. That’s not good; reading is supposed to be fun.

Unlike a traditional book, where I can turn a page with a quick, well-practiced swish of the thumb and forefinger, I instead need to press a plasticky little button and wait two seconds while the screen panics for a second or two, before finally delivering the next few hundred words. It’s not a pleasant experience, and I’ve already learned to hit the next-page button at the start of the final sentence, so as to minimise plot-destroying gaps in flow.

Every eBook reader we’ve had in has suffered from the same problem, as each shares the same E-Ink display – because there’s only one company in the world that makes them.

This is worrying, at least for anyone who makes eBook readers. If the screen is the problem, then throwing any amount of processing power or memory at it will do no good. What is needed before eBook readers take off in a big way, then, is nothing to do with public perception, nothing to do with ergonomic design and nothing to do with sensibly priced media: an entirely new screen technology is what’s called for.

There are plenty of contenders. Firstly it may be that E-ink develops faster transition times. The way it works, strangley, is that a layer of tiny balls is trapped between two layers of plastic. One side of the ball is negatively charged, and darkly coloured, while the other is positively charged and white. Passing a current through the layers can rotate the ball to show light or dark. It’s very clever, but it takes time.

Electro-wetting is another hopeful technology, which uses a layer of water and coloured oil between two plates. When a current is passed over a pixel, the water forces the dark oil out of the area, giving a white pixel. The advantage of this is that it is almost instantaneous compared to E-ink, so can even be used for video. The technology is also more easily adaptable for multiple colours – who wants to go back in time to monochrome screens, anyway?
Or maybe the answer lies with Organic Field-Effect Transistors (OFET) or Organic light-emitting diodes (OLED) or something that we haven’t even heard of yet. Perhaps, as I suspect is the case for the next decade or so, the answer lies in paper and ink; it’s cheaper, greener, more tactile and it even smells nice.