Several companies, including Xerox Corp., are working on electronic pages that look and feel like paper. The Xerox technology is called Gyricon and is composed of a silicon rubber compound with the thickness and flexibility of poster board. The sheets have thousands of plastic balls suspended in oil. Each ball is black on one side and white on the other, and together they act as pixels to display images. Gyricon uses reflective light, like real paper, so it uses little electrical power. The Gyricon device can be connected to a PC—even a handheld one—to download content from the Internet, or a user can write on it and reuse it. The thinking is that electronic books will be more popular if read from some thing that resembles the printed page. Research is expected to continue for at least another two years, but other vendors—including new companies such as E-Ink Corp.—are racing to bring competing products to the market before 2002.
https://librarytechnology.org/document/8151/