printed materials are one of the few consumer objects
that generally do not expire or become obsolete, meaning they can’t be quickly ‘consumed’ and discarded, but just sit there taking up space,
for years or even decades.

Late 1990

electronic paper’ or ‘e-paper’,
a display consisting not of illuminated pixels, but of electrically charged
micro-spheres (or pixels without light) that can be made to turn either
black or white according to the polarity of the charge.

In 2008 and 2009 each of the important players in the field (Sony,
Amazon, Barnes & Noble) announced and/or launched its own model
featuring its own appealing characteristics: a miniature keyboard, a
double screen to resemble an open book or magazine,154 and so on.
Besides the product itself, consumers often find themselves involuntarily buying into the associated propaganda (for example, the
promise/threat of driving the newspaper industry out of business).
The marketing team for Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader has already
calculated – and loudly proclaimed – that printing and delivering the
New York Times over a period of a year costs twice as much as sending
each subscriber a free Kindle device.155 Furthermore, if we consider
on one hand the massive book-scanning programmes currently being
conducted (such as Google Books), and on the other hand the potential
availability of almost everything currently being produced in electronic form, then the prospects for the immediate future start to seem
very appealing (or tantalising) indeed. But does anyone out there have
a truly strategic vision of how best to proceed, in a way that both preserves and enhances all the valuable idiosyncrasies of print?

2007
At the press launch for the Kindle, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos declared that “books are the last bastion of analog” – thus implicitly declaring an all-out war on this metaphorical bastion.

“(the book) is a more reliable
storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface… And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries.”

The Kindle is silent, lightweight (a mere 10 ounces or 290 grammes)
and only slightly larger than a standard paperback. The user can
change the font size at will (a godsend for older readers). The device
can contain a few hundred books, it allows the user to search within the
text, and it can navigate the Internet: virtual goods can be purchased
through wireless mobile broadband, leading Bezos to claim: “This isn’t
a device, it’s a service.”

Pro print

Pro digital

the challenge for any reading
device will be whether it allows the reader to focus on the words and
ideas, rather than on the technology

Con digital

First of all, there are the technical limitations of the e-paper technology: not only must e-books be externally illuminated (just like real books) but there is a noticeable delay in turning pages, so that browsing through an e-book is not such a quick and simple process as flipping through the pages of a physical book.

just as any other electronic device, e-books
are easily damaged by water or by being dropped, and must be regularly recharged in order to be of any use at all.

customers are not allowed to
resell or lend content which they have bought, a restriction enforced
through various DRM (Digital Rights Management) copy protection
schemes.

Worse still (and in case anyone still needs convincing that
customer profiling is here to stay), every single e-book or e-magazine
purchase is tracked and registered, just like anything else on any network.

“They gave everybody back their copies and promised they would
never do it again – unless they had a court order. I’ve worked as a
bookseller, and no bookseller has ever had to make a promise at the
cash register: ‘Here’s your books. I promise I won’t come to your
house and take them away again – unless I have a court order.’”

And of course, there is one feature of paper books that no e-book
can convey (at least not yet): their smell.

Apple itself commissioned
a tablet prototype in 1989 from a company called Smart Design; the
concept and the design of this prototype is a good example of the computer aesthetics of the period. The device used a solid-state memory
card for long-term storage; as Tom Dair (co-founder and president of
Smart Design) recalled recently, “we thought that someday, catalogs
and magazines would arrive in the (snail) mail in the memory card format for viewing on such a device.”


A few years later, in 1992, the Knight Ridder newspaper chain
founded the Information Design Lab in Boulder, Colorado, in order
to explore the future of news. The journalist and newspaper designer
Roger Fidler, who was leading the research lab, believed that the traditional horizontal computer screen was unsuitable for reading newspapers; and so the ‘tablet newspaper’ (tablet prototypes were currently under development throughout the computer industry) should feature a vertical screen, as well as a completely new interface.

Then in the late 2000s, in a remarkable turn of events, the rows of
icons and the clumsy animated mechanisms meant to (re)animate the
on-screen simulation of paper started to disappear, and the classic
paperback interface was resurrected in all its powerful historical simplicity. The most striking example is Wikipedia, where each entry can
be formatted into a standard encyclopedia design, generating a single
printable PDF file.182 There’s even an advanced option which makes it
possible to assemble, preview and print Wikipedia content in a classic
‘perfect bound’ book style, including automatically generated indexes,
tables of contents, etc. The resulting book can be purchased through
PediaPress.

In 1936 in the United States various prototypes
of the Newspaper via Radio Facsimile190 started offering condensed
versions of newspapers (a few pages long) sent through radio waves
and printed on facsimile paper by a special printer integrated in the
radio receiver. The technology was developed to enable distribution
of national newspapers to potentially every household across this huge
country, something otherwise impossible at the time through traditional methods of printing and distribution. Though the medium was
doomed from the start by enormous technical limitations (slowness,
poor reproduction of images, small paper sizes), most major newspapers offered a facsimile edition, such as the New York Times which
published its first four-page facsimile on February 16th, 1948.

Will ‘reflowability’ soon make predefined formatting and layout
altogether obsolete? Whatever the case, this is clearly another example
of the forced simplification of an old medium by a new (electronic) one.
The loss of a predefined layout is not perceived as an actual loss of content, but rather a requirement for rendering the content as ‘naked’ so
that it may later be dynamically ‘dressed up’ at will – a typical digitisation process. In this case, losing part of the content, its original layout,
means making the rest of the content portable, and in the end possibly
universal.

The early 1990s saw the first serious attempts to create and distribute
a popular non-physical magazine – the earliest CD-ROM magazines
(see chapter 2.7). The novelty thrill and the charm of the new visual interface soon gave way to a growing disenchantment, which had mostly
to do with the medium’s most serious shortcoming: its slowness. In a
comprehensive 1994 review of the major CD-ROM titles of the period, the magazine Entertainment Weekly squarely dismissed the new
medium: a (physical) “magazine is disposable, portable, malleable…”
whereas “imagine having to wait five seconds before turning each page
of Entertainment Weekly”.

PDF, previously a proprietary format of Adobe Systems
Incorporated, was officially released as an open standard on July
1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for
Amazon interface after
installing the Pirates
of the Amazon Firefox
plug-in, 2008
101
Standardization as ISO 32000-1:2008.208 Although the PDF format
is now widely accepted as the universal standard for publishing (and
reading) electronic magazines and books, online businesses wishing to
maintain control over their published content tend to use their own
proprietary formats (such as Amazon with its Kindle platform).

The late 1930s saw the development of various innovative technologies combining microphotography (photographic reduction of the
original printed pages) with devices for re-enlarging any part of the
pages at will. One early ‘canned library’223 was the Optigraph, which
displayed pages on an illuminated screen, with a handle for scrolling
through the content. The basic concept is strikingly similar to that of
the ‘bookwheel’224 invented by the Italian military engineer Agostino
Ramelli all the way back in 1588: a simple mechanical device based on
a wooden wheel which allowed a reader to access a selection of heavy
books with a minimum of movement and effort.

Limited editions