User:Eleanorg/annotation/Post Digital Print

chapter 1: The Death of Paper (which never happened)

• Death of paper has been announced periodically since the early 20th century
• Telegraph, radio, then television seemed to predict takeover of books by audio media
• 'Paperless office' hype of the 70s-80s also failed as screens are a poor imitation of physical paper
• Hypertext (not a new medium, but a new concept for dealing with reading) - finally offered something paper could not
• However, our attachment to printed paper remains - albeit with new 'hypertextual' ways of thinking (eg Wikipedia's web-to-print software)

chapter 2: A History of Alternative Publishing Reflecting the Evolution of Print

• 20th century avant-garde/s re-imagined the book/magazine but didn't do away with it as a paradigm
• Dadaists, Futurists, Surrealists & Fluxus challenged how publications were composed & distributed
• Cheap new printing technology (mimeograph, Xerox) facilitated DIY publishing in 60s-80s
• Mail Art anticipated networked publishing of the WWW
• Digital content added to print media in 90s as 'bonus content' (e.g. free floppy disc with magazine)
• by 2000 print zines have been overtaken by blogs
• Fluxus artist Dick Higgins' prediction of 'intermedia' now a reality

chapter 3: The Mutation of Paper: Material Paper in Immaterial Times

• Printed newspapers dying, or adapting to new distribution models (e.g. Evening Standard: free, funded by ads)
• Need for periodicals to shift their focus to providing 'best of' summaries of yesterday's news
• The situation of online news: aggregation and 'atomising content' into user-curated feeds
• The emergence of 'predictive news' in the 24hr news environment, and artworks responding to it
• The importance of the physicality of printed paper
• POD sees paper taking on attributes of digital media: instant, updatable, customizable

chapter 4: The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page?

• "Rhetoric"/"propaganda mantra" (p.83) of e-publishers urges us to abandon space-consuming books, as mass digitization (Project Gutenberg, Google Books) becomes a reality.
• Drawbacks of ebooks: clumsy hardware and proprietorial software culture (e.g. Kindle DRM, tracking, remote deletion etc) (p.88)
• The return to "good old" book/magazine layout as the best interface, inserting multimedia rather than re-inventing whole design (e.g. iPad editions) (p.92-93)
• Devices are emerging to display newspapers onscreen, AND to print out digital files - "to bring virtual, real-time content 'offscreen'" (p.97)
• Various serious/experimental ways of distributing files: .pdf torrents, book scanning software...
• Digital can learn from paper's long design history. Paper can learn from digital's atomization of content. (p.117)