If Fujitsu is right, and the world pulps the flat, white stuff and switches to its patented “e-paper”, a wafer-thin film of plastic that can slip easily into a handbag or briefcase will “turn” each new page at the push of a button.

In the brave new world envisaged by Fujitsu, flexible e-paper will appear everywhere from advertising hoardings to price tags in supermarkets.

E-paper scrolls will unfurl from the backs of mobile phones to form large screens for viewing websites and reading maps. Fridge doors coated in e-paper could deliver downloads of recipes or traffic updates. Almost any level surface, in fact, could become an e-paper billboard.

Takashi Uchiyama, the head of e-paper development at Fujitsu, confidently told The Times that his product “will be everywhere, soon”.

Fujitsu says that the first commercial uses of its product will begin in Japanese supermarkets and commuter trains next year, and will probably spread quickly from there. Fujitsu’s chief rival in the e-paper game, Dai-Nippon Printing, has a similar product — it is more flexible, but has less richness of colour — that will also enter commercial production next year.

E-paper’s great strength is that, once a new image — files such as a newspaper page, a map or an advertisement — has been “printed” on to its liquid crystal surface, the image will remain there without any additional power supply.

Fujitsu has received hundreds of inquiries from industries interested in the technology, which would effectively deliver many of the advantages of large, flat-screen liquid crystal TV displays, but with none of the power requirements, high cost or fragility.

In theory, a newspaper made of e-paper could be put into a bag, and it will be possible to flick through thousands of pages on the voltage of a watch battery. There are drawbacks: e-paper cannot be folded and the type is significantly less clear than the traditional printed page. The advantage is that it can renew its display, in full colour, every three seconds, but at the moment it cannot show moving images.

Fujitsu’s e-paper is 0.8mm thick, about eight times thicker than paper, and an A4 sheet can be coiled into a cylinder with the diameter of a CD.

Dr Uchiyama said that the three-second barrier would be broken in the next “two or three years”, and that there is a strong possibility that video images could be screened.

In the past, reports of the death of paper have been greatly exaggerated: the paperless office never materialised and reading books from a small, handheld screen has yet to take off in a serious way. But there is no shortage of high-tech companies that would love to deal paper a mortal blow — Sony, Toppan Forms and several others would. As perhaps the furthest advanced in this field, Fujitsu has beaten its rivals in producing a commercial version.

The most probable first outings for the paper are as surfaces for showing advertisements that could change throughout the day. Because the film would be relatively inexpensive to produce — and far cheaper than LCD TV displays — it could easily be fixed to the backs of seats on trains, buses and other public transport to provide news updates and timetables. Supermarkets are expected to use e-paper signs to update price changes on goods and draw attention to special offers.

WRITE HISTORY

3500BC Egyptians pressed and dried the soft insides of reeds to make papyrus. Almost all surviving Greek and Roman literature is written on this

AD105 Tsai Lun, favourite eunuch of the Chinese emperor, is credited with making paper from silk rags

306 Constantine, the Roman emperor, ordered 50 manuscripts of the Bible made on vellum, paper made from treated calfskin

1498 A mill making paper from rags recorded in the property list of Henry VII

1774 Bleaching of paper with chlorine invented

Late 1800s Paper using wood chips and pulp developed

Today Paper produced at 15,000 metres per minute

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