Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

during the 1970s by Nick Sheridon. The first electronic paper, called
Gyricon, 152 was made of polyethylene spheres with negatively charged
black plastic on one side and positively charged white plastic on the
other; the spheres were embedded in a transparent silicone sheet,
with each sphere suspended in a bubble of oil, allowing them to rotate
freely, displaying either their black or white side. 153
After years of producing poorly-designed and cumbersome electronic
book readers, the industry in 2008 finally started delivering on
its promise of an electronic technology for reading printed content on
a mobile device. Though it’s too early to tell whether or not this will
actually transform the way people read, there are some strong reasons
to see how it might: besides the obvious thrill of a new gadget, there’s
the attraction of all the space that can be saved as well as the ability to
access our entire collection of reading materials in the course of our urban
nomadic movements (‘always available’ is another key catchphrase
in the marketing of e-books).
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?
4.1.1 The Bezos vision: Kindle the world.
The most serious effort in producing a e-book reader focusing on the
reading experience itself, rather than on a bunch of (arguably useless)
IT-centric features, must surely be Amazon’s Kindle. This is largely
due to the fact that the Kindle was not conceived by a hardware manufacturer,
but rather by a giant online retailer of content (still generally
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