The Message over the Medium

Because they run off the same technology,whatever happens to print media also happens to books. Shortly after newspapers ran their own advance obituaries,their books pages started publishing warnings of another impending mass extinction. They began to memorialise the high of opening a new book and inhaling the heady aroma of fresh ink,and querulously pointed out that it was impossible to curl up with a good computer. Very true,since the world was mostly running clunky 486 machines with mono terminals at the time. Today,it is almost possible to curl up with a good book downloaded into a good tablet. Since ink and paper are slowing down,publishers celebrate growth in electronic sales. Ebooks feel as mainstream as paperbacks.

The conventional Gutenberg world ended almost without a whimper towards the end of the last decade. The Kindle was released in 2007,the first waypoint in a journey to new epistemologies. But the human race had embarked on that journey a decade earlier,in 1997,when the E Ink electrophoretic ink Corporation was established to manufacture electronic paper. The next year,in the audience at the Global Forum for Media Development in Athens,I could see another turning point: for the first time,Southern media was not very willing to be shown the way by the North. Because while their papers were closing down,ours were prospering,riding a wave of new literacy.

We have finally adjusted to the post-Gutenberg,post-McLuhan world,wherein the message is medium-agnostic and massages are brazenly advertised on lampposts and in newspaper columns. These are reckless,feckless times that the author of The Medium is the Massage Bantam,1967 would have found invigorating. Yes,it was massage,not message. Apparently,McLuhan took a shine to a typo on the cover proof,perhaps reading it as a nod to medias hallowed role of massaging powerful egos.

Ink and paper have served as humanitys collective race memory for half a millennium,allowing us to pull ahead of the rest of the animal kingdom,which depends on genetic memory. We evolve as a networked knowledge system rather than as biological individuals. But you still cant curl up with a good Kindle,can you? Personally,I have been reading on screens since the Nineties and curl up routinely with a cheap Gingerbread phone now playing Sax Rohmers The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu,the original yellow peril but the general public is conservative in these matters. However,the next big thing in curl-up computing is almost ready to go mainstream. The year after the Kindle debuted,Plastic Logic,founded in 2002,had started a factory in Dresden for manufacturing flexible displays. Running off organic thin film transistors,thats something that you can not only curl up with,but also roll up and stuff in your pocket,exactly like a newspaper. Or almost.

The more things change,the more they remain the same. E Ink was incubated by the Media Lab at MIT,Plastic Logic has its roots in Cambridge Universitys Cavendish Lab and though HP,LG,Nokia and Sony are also developing displays,the other serious player is Arizona State University. Smells a bit like the Sixties,when all world-altering things seemed to come out of campus involvement in space programmes,defence projects and government labs. And while the USP of ebook readers is that you can renew them endlessly,the beauty of electronic paper is that eventually,all over again,we shall have dog-eared books.

What great strides we are taking in order to return home! The technology that was expected to lay the ghost of Gutenberg is replicating him. Infinite replicability was the principle at the heart of the Gutenberg revolution. Which,it appears,is far from over. n