It’s a document reader roughly the size and shape of an A4 pad of paper.

In the meantime, Amazon has launched Kindle, ‘an electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper’. That product is aimed mainly at people wanting to read entire books, while Plastic Logic claims its reader – which it hasn’t named yet – is aimed ‘specifically at business users’.

In keeping with that aim, the reader supports formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, as well as Adobe PDFs. Its user interface is gesture-based and it includes software that will help organise and manage information. As with Kindle, users can connect to data sources wirelessly.

Where Plastic Logic’s reader differs from Kindle, and other readers on the market, is its display. That’s where the Cambridge boffins come in. Plastic Logic’s display technology is based on circuits printed on plastic, a technology with potentially broad applications and which industry research group IDTechEx reckons will be worth $30 billion (£16.9 billion) by 2015.