Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

– A well-organised online platform for quickly, efficiently and
officially selling commercial products (iBookstore/Newsstand),
thereby immediately securing the cooperation of all major
content providers.
– Locally-run software to handle products purchased online
(the same iBooks/iBookstore/Newsstand) as well as digital
materials already owned by the user.
– Compliance with existing file standards (PDF when layout is
important, EPUB for reflowable text) so that content can be
easily accessed, shared and digitised/converted/produced.
– Making digitised materials ‘transmittable’: the multimedia files
are small enough to be transmitted on the Internet within a
reasonable amount of time (in the case of print, this has already
been the case for several years).
– On the more recent models, the device’s screen resolution is
nearly indistinguishable from that of printed paper, thus
eliminating for the first time another crucial difference
between pixel and print.
Using a tablet computer as a medium for reading digital print products
is much more than a mere cosmetic enhancement; it is what potentially
makes the iPad the next Sony Walkman. Yet the tablet’s basic
premise is in itself nothing new (a computer roughly the size of a sheet
of paper, consisting of only a screen and some kind of interface – before
the touchscreen, there was the stylus). 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.” 171
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
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