With this, a daily newspaper could be uploaded onto a flexible paperlike display that could be updated as fast as the news cycles. It will be cheap to produce, perhaps only costing $5 for a 5-inch screen.

Alibaba has wholesale LCD screens at that price or less but they would not be paper-thin.

New screen has two key innovations for achieving highly flexible designs.

1. Is the recent development of optically rewritable LCDs. Like conventional LCD displays, the display is structured like a sandwich, with a liquid crystal filling between two plates. Unlike conventional liquid crystals where electrical connections on the plates create the fields required to switch individual pixels from light to dark, optically rewritable LCDs coat the plates with special molecules that realign in the presence of polarized light and switch the pixels. This removes the need for traditional electrodes, reduces the structure's bulk and allows more choices in the type and thickness of plates.