Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

A vision of the book
reader of the future
(from Everyday Science
and Mechanics
magazine, 1935)
Gyricon electric
paper and
printer, 2000
4.1 electronic paper,
the basis of electronic publishing.
The first e-book, unsurprisingly, was a product of the usual early
hacker spirit. Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, used his mainframe computer time (during the
night of the Fourth of July, 1971) to retype on a Teletype machine the
text from a copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence which he had
been given at a grocery store. He then sent an e-mail to another 100
or so Arpanet users to tell them where they could download the e-text
(Hart would eventually go on to found Project Gutenberg, which aims
to eventually make available 1 million free e-books 151 ).
In the late 1990s, a new technology was announced which was supposed
to eventually replace paper: ‘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. This technology
was first developed at Xerox Corp.’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
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