There was a moment of ribald hilarity at the first government-sponsored e-book conference in 1998, where the e-book industry was officially launched in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. As one of the few attendees from the traditional publishing sector, I was surrounded by a crowd of techies, engineers, entrepreneurial pioneers, geeks and dreamers who had toiled in the rocky e-book vineyard for years and were at last about to witness the realization of their vision. After a number of presentations had been given, a professorial gentleman took the podium and began a power point presentation. On the auditorium screen was a picture of what looked like tiny white balls.

The presenter explained that we were looking at something he called E Ink. Suspended in a liquid were millions of microcapsules containing particles that were dark on one side and light on the other, and each side had oppositely charged particles. By applying an electronic field, the white surface became black. And by sending a computer message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like a “W”, the screen would show the letter W. Or by sending a message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like War and Peace, the screen would show a book-length screen containing Tolstoy’s epic.

He touched a key on his keyboard advancing to the next slide. Voila!

“See? Your white balls just turned black,” the gentleman explained. He did not crack a smile.

An undercurrent of titters swept the audience as he droned on humorlessly about your white balls turning black and your black balls turning white. Aside from the inadvertent pun, the concept struck me as preposterous. I turned to a colleague and said, “That dog won’t hunt!”

Last month the E Ink Corporation was bought by a Taiwanese company for $215 million.

My notes on that 1998 conference are lost, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the presenter was Joe Jacobson, creator of electronic ink, who was awarded a patent for it in 2000.

He who titters last titters best.

Richard Curtis