Index

CONTENTS

Introduction. 7

Chapter 1 – The death of paper (which never happened). 15
1.1 Early threats to the printed medium. 15
1.2 Wires will strangle the sluggish paper. 17
1.3 The Readies: machine-reading words without pages. 19
1.4 H.G. Wells declares the newspaper dead: up-to-date news by telephone is the future. 20
1.5 An attempt by radio to steal newspapers’ loyal customers. 21
1.6 The ‘cold’ visual power of television vs. the ‘dead’ book and the ‘mosaic’ of the newspaper. 22
1.7 Computers virtualising paper: the ‘paperless’ propaganda. 24
1.8 Hypertext, something paper can’t be. 27
1.9 The death of paper… has yet to happen. 29

Chapter 2 – A history of alternative publishing reflecting the evolution of print. 31
2.1 Print is liberating. 31
2.2 The use of print in the 20th century avant-garde. 33
2.3 The mimeograph or stencil duplicator, enabling underground publishing. 36
2.4 Fluxus, printed materials circulating within an ‘Eternal Network’. 38
2.5 The underground press boom, offset colour dripping and the network (again). 41
2.6 Photocopying the world, re-appropriating culture. 43
2.7 The digital revolution, and the peak and fall of zines. 47
2.8 Intertwining media, a look at the near future. 50

Chapter 3 – The mutation of paper: material paper in immaterial times. 54
3.1 The mass slaughter of newspapers. 55
3.1.1 The mass slaughter of periodical print. 58
3.2 Atomising content: implementing the Apple/iTunes paradigm. 60
3.2.1 Automated content: the news follows the reader. 61
3.3 Preemptive news: the battle for the online attention market. 62
3.4 Space, physicality, and repeatability of print. 66
3.4.1 The publishing gesture. 67
3.5 Print on demand, the balance of power between paper and pixel. 70
3.5.1 Vanity press, freedom of expression and self-gratification. 72
3.5.2 The frontiers of POD: customisation and open source 74
3.6 Independent magazine strategies, teaming up for success. 78
3.7 The automated digital production trap. 80
3.8 Print and digital are getting married, and that’s exactly where the real problems start. 82

Chapter 4 – The end of paper: can anything actually replace the printed page? 83
4.1 Electronic paper, the basis of electronic publishing. 84
4.1.1 The Bezos vision: Kindle the world. 85
4.1.2 Resisting the e-book paradigm. 87
4.1.3 The iPad paradigm: publishing for the iCustomer. 89
4.1.4 The turning point: electronic content with the look and feel of print. 93
4.1.5 Newspapers on-screen and off-screen. 95
4.2 ‘Reflowability’: mobile style in reading and writing. 97
4.3 Delivering content, from discs to wireless networks. 98
4.4 Going digital: vanishing libraries. 102
4.5 Print becomes a limited-edition object. 106
4.5.1 Intermediate strategies: using digital media for selling print. 108
4.6 Post-digital print. 109
4.7 Print and online: friend or foe? Conceptual differences and similarities between print and blogs. 111
4.8 Which is more environmentally friendly: print or digital? 115
4.9 Paper is flesh. Screen is metal. 117

Chapter 5 – Distributed archives: paper content from the past,
paper content for the future. 118
5.1 The ‘online giants’ and their approach to ‘archiving’ printed materials. 118
5.2 Preserving independent magazines, a controversial struggle. 126
5.3 Distributed Archives, the peer-to-peer archive model. 128
5.3.1 The need for a ‘flowable’ archive form 130
5.4 The art of the archive: hard-copying the digital database. 131
5.5 Scrapbooks, grassroots archiving as a new methodology. 135

Chapter 6 – The network: transforming culture, transforming publishing. 138
6.1 The magazine as network node. 138
6.1.1 Network means distributing, and distribution substantially benefits from the network. 139
6.1.2 The network as infrastructure: agencies, syndicating, and directories. 141
6.1.3 The network as a means of political support and sustainable business: the Punti Rossi (‘Red Points’) project. 142
6.2 Collaboration is better than competition: the Mag.net network. 143
6.3 The network as a large-scale experiment: the Documenta 12 Magazines project. 145
6.4 External support networks, assisting publishing gestures from faraway. 147
6.5 The network: the future starts here. 149

Conclusion Post-digital print: a future scenario 153
Appendix Print vs. electrons: 100 differences and similarities between paper and pixel. 159

Afterword by Florian Cramer 162