Alessandro Ludovico
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POSt- DIGITAL PRINT The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 Alessandro Ludovico ONOMATOPEE 77 In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of every- day life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun. Still, the vision of this transformation is far from new. For more than a century now, avant-garde artists, activists and technologists have been anticipating the development of networked and electronic publishing. Although in hindsight the reports of the death of paper were greatly exaggerated, electronic publishing has now certainly become a reality. How will the analog and the digital coexist in the post-digital age of publishing? How will they transition, mix and cross over? In this book, Alessandro Ludovico re-reads the history of media technology, cultural activism and the avant- garde arts as a prehistory of cutting through the so-called dichotomy between paper and electronics. Ludovico is the editor and publisher of Neural, a magazine for critical digital culture and media arts. For more than twenty years now, he has been working at the cutting edge (and the outer fringes) of both print publishing and politically engaged digital art. ISBN 9789078454878 90000 > 9 789078 454878 POSt- DIGITAL PRINT The Mutation of Publishing since 1894 Alessandro Ludovico ONOMATOPEE 77 1 2 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 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 4 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 5 Newspaper extinction timeline, 2011 6 Introduction. We’ve all heard the news: print is dead. Every year, declining reader- ship and advertisement sales are forcing hundreds of well-established newspapers and magazines out of business, while employment figures within the industry have fallen back to mid-1950s levels.1 At the same time, (independent) bookshops are withering and falling like so many autumn leaves. Digital publishing, on the other hand, is now a booming business, with traditional publishers embracing every new standard or technology in an often desperate effort to impress their sceptical share- holders. And the market for reading devices and platforms is beginning to get very crowded indeed, while digital versions of every imaginable printed material are distributed online with ever-increasing ease and speed. Online news distribution is also clearly spiralling out of control, which is why a recent April Fools’ Day hoax by the internationally esteemed British newspaper, the Guardian, announcing that it would henceforth be publishing its news exclusively through Twitter, could sound even remotely plausible… And yet, there are still plenty of newsstands and bookshops around, well-stocked with a wide variety of printed products. And if you are reading these words on paper (which you probably are) then you have, for some reason, chosen to go with the ‘old’ medium. Why? Probably because it still comes with the very best ‘interface’ ever designed. So is print really dead? Is it going to die anytime soon? In this book, we shall be examining a particular (and often puzzling) period in the history of print – starting with the moment its death was first an- nounced (already quite a long time ago, as we shall see) up to the pre- sent day, as new digital technologies are rapidly transforming both the status and the role of printed materials. There are many different and often contradictory signals to be con- sidered here, but it is crucial to see them within a historical perspec- tive, as well as in the context of the most current developments. We shall attempt here to collect and systematise as many of these signals as space allows – examining various technologies, experiments, and visionary works of art, as well as hard facts and figures. The traditional role of print is unmistakeably being threatened by the new digital world; but it is also, paradoxically, being revitalised. Both media share a certain number of characteristics, and yet they are fundamentally dif- ferent – and they also fulfil different needs (for example, digital is built for speed, while print ensures stability). 7 The two media are clashing as well, resulting in efforts from both sides to discover some ideally balanced publishing ‘nirvana’, where pixels and paper live together in a perfect symbiosis, generating (of course) an endless flow of revenue for everyone involved. In an ef- fort to reach this utopian goal, publishers of all shapes and sizes are currently developing and investing in countless hybrid strategies and products: strange beasts which incorporate, either literally or concep- tually, elements and qualities of both paper and pixels, in an effort to score the highest possible degree of customer satisfaction – and thus revenue. But, being hybrids, these strategies and products face an uphill struggle to be accepted, let alone embraced – and in order to do so, they must quickly find their own role and niche within the global marketplace. As they struggle for survival, they must rapidly evolve and adapt to an ever-changing media environment. One direct consequence of this process, obviously, is that printed publishing will never be the same again: it is being deeply transformed by two opposite (even contradic- tory) needs.