Color e-books set for 2010

Holding off on buying a Kindle? That might not be such a bad idea, as color versions of electronic paper displays are well underway, with commercial products likely to hit the market in the second half of next year.

Current, monochrome e-paper displays work by using thousands of tiny balls, white on one side and black on the other. When electrically charged appropriately, the black or the white side of the ball can be made to point "up" toward the face of the display.

Adding color to this mix complicates things considerably, because a variety of different balls must be built into the display, much like the matrix of red, green, and blue pixels in an LCD display. It's obviously doable, but the technology has obviously taken great effort to perfect.

Color would be a game-changing addition to the e-book world, for obvious reasons: Charts and graphics would be far more legible, magazines could show color photographs, and, perhaps most critically, advertisers would get far more jazzed about the platform.

As would readers: Even a splash of color can make the difference between a staid and tired reading experience and an engaging one. Even the Wall Street Journal started printing color photos a few years ago.

And the color ebook may not even be a full year away: One e-book manufacturer told me recently that he expected to see color displays on the market within six months. And producers of color e-paper modules should be shipping units out to device manufacturers to start experimenting with them before the end of the month.