Newspapers, too, may be little changed in appearance but greatly altered in function by the advent of electronic paper. Robert Steinbugler, an IBM designer, won a 1999 Industrial Design Excellence Award from the Industrial Designers Society of America for a mock-up of the newspaper of tomorrow. It looked like a thin version of The New York Times, except that the loose pages were bound to an aluminum spine mounted on a hard pad, slightly larger than the e-pages, which contained command buttons. In Steinbugler’s design, the spine and pad held a battery, a data port and enough memory to store hundreds of newspapers. Future readers could flip through the sheets, which had the serendipitously jumbled-together articles of real newspapers, but switch between sections by clicking buttons; with a jab from the thumb, the news would vanish from the page and be replaced by the sports. The effort wasn’t merely conceptual; IBM is gearing up its own e-paper drive, using another variant of organic circuitry. “E-paper is the key,” Steinbugler says. “I always say that the last person to enjoy reading on a stiff tablet was Moses.”