Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

Fiona Banner,
Book 1 of 1,
2009
momentary (a Twitter post) and something which is meant to remain (a
diary) in a perfectly classic graphic format. 126 Perhaps inspired by this
book’s success, various services appealing to the Twitter microblogger’s
‘vanity’ have cropped up, such as Bookapp’s Tweetbook 127 which
makes it possible to print one’s tweets in a standard book format, and
Tweetghetto 128 which uses the tweets to generate a poster which can
then be purchased for display.
An individual’s ‘virtual identity’ (the collection of posts and other
activities on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook) is
by nature ephemeral – unless of course it is printed. And so, as part of
a promotional strategy for the French telecommunications company
Bouygues Télécom, the DDB Paris ad agency invented a new kind of
printed product: an offline copy of a Facebook profile. Participants
could order a book of their own profile, covering a specified timeframe
and including profiles of up to ten of their friends. The campaign was a
huge success: 1,000 books were requested within one hour. 129
Finally, taking the concept of vanity press to the limit, Fiona
Banner’s Book 1 of 1 130 is a conceptual artwork which “questions the
currency of the multiple or limited edition”.
Each of her ‘books’ is a singlepage,
single-copy publication “printed
on reflective mirror card” and “registered
under its own individual title”
and ISBN number. Each single copy of
the edition is thus an official publication
in its own right, meeting all the administrative
requirements (which, interestingly,
do not include text content). The
result is an imaginary printed space,
reduced to a single, almost empty page
which reflects both (metaphorically) the
author’s intention and (literally) the reader’s face in its mirror cover.
3.5.2 The frontiers of POD: customisation and open source.
Of course, print on demand is a medium suitable for all kinds of business
models besides vanity press. In fact, several established publishers
have started releasing their out-of-print back catalogues in POD.
Also, the University of Michigan’s Shapiro Library has purchased an
Espresso Book Machine specifically for the purpose of printing such
titles.
Another possibility, still under development, is to customise the
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