Published November 8, 2010

E Ink is poised to transform the e-book again —  this time in color.

The Cambridge-based, Taiwan-owned company makes the screens used in 90 percent of e-readers, including Amazon’s Kindle. The technology began as research in the MIT Media Lab in 1997.

E Ink is wicked legible, even in direct sunlight. (Martouf via Wikimedia Commons)

E Ink text is highly legible, even in bright sunlight. (Trying to read on an iPad at high noon is an exercise in futility.) But E Ink screens have been limited to shades of gray, until now.

First, a quick primer on how E Ink works: Black and white pigments embedded in the screen are electrified. A reader “flips” a page and the pigments are physically rearranged to form a new image.

The Hanvon e-reader, made in Beijing, will be the first color E Ink device, the New York Times reports. The technology uses the same electirifed pigments but adds a color filter. Colors won’t pop like they do on an iPad or your flat TV, but the battery life remains the same — measured in weeks, not hours.

No word yet on when the tech might be available in the United States.

A new version of the Barnes & Noble e-reader, Nook, will soon be available in color. But that uses liquid crystals, not E Ink.

In other e-book news, the Globe’s Hiawatha Bray reports on a new partnership between a Concord company and Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to sell color e-readers for children. The Fable will be a sort of iPad-Kindle hybrid and run on Google’s Android mobile operating system.