Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

The appeal of these ‘take-away’ paper products is of course the same
as that of newspapers – which are, interestingly, starting to expand
their own role and nature by offering downloadable and printable
last-minute editions, customised to one key factor: the precise time at
which they were updated. Such editions are meant to be read offline,
and thus to be consumed at a relatively unhurried pace (in contrast
with the hectic, overstretched production schedules characteristic of
any news service). All these developments should be understood in
the context of a response to a broader need: to bring virtual, real-time
online content ‘off-screen’, into some form of physical existence, as an
object to consume and interact with in the real world.
4.2 ‘reflowability’:
mobile style in reading and writing.
Reading text on a small screen has gradually become an accepted
practice – especially for the younger generation, for whom it is simply
a fact of life. This leads us to another seminal concept in electronic
publishing, ‘reflowability’: optimising the text display for each different
device. In other words, publishers (and authors) are forced to
surrender at least some (often a great deal of ) control regarding the
formatting and layout of their content. The writer and designer Craig
Mod, in his essay Books in the Age of the iPad defined this as “Formless
Content”. 195
EPUB (short for ‘electronic publication’) is the open-source standard
for reflowable content, based on the XML and CSS web-design
standards. 196 Reflowable content, in its most radical form, has already
met with commercial success in recent years in Japan. The
ubiquity of mobile phones, combined with
the huge number of commuting workers and
students, has created a 10-billion-yen market
for an entirely new literary genre called
‘keitai shousetsu’ (‘mobile phone novels’). 197
In 2007, five of the ten best-selling titles in
Japan were ‘keitai’ novels, including the number
one title, If You by ‘Rin’ (who doesn’t use
her family name when signing a text on her
mobile phone). If You sold 400,000 (physical)
copies after a publisher noticed the success
her chapters were having online. Meanwhile,
another popular title, Love Sky by ‘Mika’, is
reported to have reached a total audience of
97
The author ‘Rin’ with her mobile phone
and a copy of her novel If You, 2008