The Editors Weblog reports that electronic paper, one of the newspaper industry’s most longed-for innovations, could be available to newspapers as early as next year. Ryosuke Kuwata, vice president of E Ink Corp’s Asia-Pacific region, said today in an interview that developers are getting close to unveiling the technology. According to Kuwata, newspaper companies have made “significant moves over the past year” towards investing in the electronic newspaper. The first commercial e-paper, he says, will be tested near the end of this year and launched some time in the second half of 2009.