One reason so many of us like ereaders is because they are literally portable libraries.
It can be amusing to see what attempts to create such a thing looked like without the benefit of modern technologies.
In more recent times, a portable library could be achieved through microfiche technology:
http://worldmicrographics.com/handhe...fiche-readers/
http://worldmicrographics.com/portable-readers/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform
In fact, in the SF world, quite a few stories featured portable "ebook" readers that were projectors or goggles that used photographic film spools of text. It was the "obvious" evolution in an age without PCs and where microfiche archives were ubiquitous in the science and engineering world.
It was a very different time where Engineers often married their computers.
Quote:
Between 1927 and 1935, the Library of Congress microfilmed more than three million pages of books and manuscripts in the British Library;[8] in 1929 the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies joined to create a Joint Committee on Materials for Research, chaired for most of its existence by Robert C. Binkley, which looked closely at microform’s potential to serve small print runs of academic or technical materials. In 1933, Charles C. Peters developed a method to microformat dissertations, and in 1934 the United States National Agriculture Library implemented the first microform print-on-demand service, which was quickly followed by a similar commercial concern, Science Service.[4]
In 1935, Kodak's Recordak division began filming and publishing The New York Times on reels of 35 millimeter microfilm, ushering in the era of newspaper preservation on film.[7] This method of information storage received the sanction of the American Library Association at its annual meeting in 1936, when it officially endorsed microforms.
Harvard University Library was the first major institution to realize the potential of microfilm to preserve broadsheets printed on high-acid newsprint and it launched its "Foreign Newspaper Project" to preserve such ephemeral publications in 1938.[7] Roll microfilm proved far more satisfactory as a storage medium than earlier methods of film information storage, such as the Photoscope, the Film-O-Graph, the Fiske-O-Scope, and filmslides.
The year 1938 also saw another major event in the history of microfilm when University Microfilms International (UMI) was established by Eugene Power.[7] For the next half century, UMI would dominate the field, filming and distributing microfilm editions of current and past publications and academic dissertations. After another short-lived name change, UMI was made a part of ProQuest Information and Learning in 2001.
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