Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

in print, but any book that’s ever been in print – on this device in less
than a minute.”
In his seminal interview with Bezos, Levy also quoted a (somewhat
unfortunate) prediction by fiction writer Annie Proulx, who stated in
1994: “Nobody is going to sit down and read a novel on a twitchy little
screen. Ever.” Bezos understood that 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: “The key feature of a book is that
it disappears.” Of course, he claimed that his Kindle indeed achieves
this transcendence of physical medium, and concluded (somewhat
triumphantly): “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved
as the book and improve on it. And maybe even change the way people
read.” And perhaps he will indeed. As Marshall McLuhan once wrote:
“All the new media are art forms which have the power of imposing,
like poetry, their own assumptions.” 157
4.1.2 Resisting the e-book paradigm.
There are several good reasons why a substantial proportion of readers
(and not merely the nostalgic and conservative among them) will
continue to resist the e-book paradigm – especially when it comes to
accepting e-books as a replacement for ‘real’ books. 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. And, as novelist Justine Musk noted: how does one
get an author to sign an e-book? 158 Of course, the answer is usually: you
can’t – although in October 2010 President Obama used the touchscreen
of an iPad owned by one of his fans to give him an autograph. 159
Furthermore, the typical display resolution is still limited to black and
white only. And obviously, 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.
But there are even more serious concerns, at least for the time being.
One of these is that the e-book (and e-magazine) publishing model
creates a forced marriage between the user and the publisher, and that
once married (once the e-content has been purchased) there’s really no
simple way to separate. For example, Amazon uses its own proprietary
(.AZW) file format for the Kindle, instead of the universal PDF and
EPUB standards (native PDF support was added as an extra feature in
second-generation Kindle models, while EPUB can only be converted
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