Free (Kindle/iTunes DRM-free) Dead Media Notebook [Communications Technology History]

[ATDrake]

The Dead Media Notebook: 20th Anniversary Edition edited by Tom Whitwell from the original version compiled by multiple Arthur C. Clarke & Hugo Award-winner Bruce Sterling (ISFDB, Wikipedia), BFSA-nominee Richard Kadrey (ISFDB, Wikipedia), & FidoNet creator Tom Jennings (Wikipedia), is a set of pieces ranging from short descriptives to moderate essays on many, many forms of now-defunct communications methods & technologies throughout history, ranging from Inca quipu cords to talking greeting cards to the Magic Lantern devices which presaged moving pictures, to trained pigeon post in various eras, to a whole bunch of computer stuff including pre-WWII speech synthesis, as well as more modern inventions, free courtesy of publisher Music Thing Press.

Though a lot of the pieces are rather short, there are literally hundreds of them, enough to make this some 500+ pages long. They're often really quite interesting and many obscure forms of communication or attempts thereof are covered with just enough references that you might want to look things up in further detail.

Currently free @ iTunes (available to Canadians & apparently worldwide when I spot-check in a Made for iBooks format which unfortunately does not seem to contain any multimedia which would justify its use instead of plain ePub) and thence price-matched in selected regional stores at Amazon (not available to Canadians at present, though that will probably change if enough of my fellow countrypersons avail themselves of the Report A Lower Price function).

It's DRM-free over at Amazon, and probably also iTunes, although in this case that just means you can port it over to another iBooks install without having to sign in to authenticate.

For the international Gentle Readers who have neither a working iBooks installation with which to read this, nor a geo-restriction-bypassing Amazon account to otherwise obtain it if it hasn't gone free in their locale yet, the accompanying website which hosts a lot of the original notes is available here: DeadMedia.org.

And this has been the selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Because a quasi-academic historical survey of often scientifically-driven technological inventions and their cultural usages is so Relevant To My Interests™ that it's like a hat trick of win and awesome.

Be nice if the iBooks version had some actual accompanying multimedia content to justify its formatting as such, though. Oh well. Maybe they'll put up a plain ePub version at some point or add some pictures and videos.

Enjoy!

Description
From Pigeon Post to Magic Lanterns to the Talking View-Master, this book is a compendium of dead and forgotten media formats.

In 1995, Bruce Sterling issued a challenge; “I'll personally offer a CRISP FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL for the first guy, gal, or combination thereof to write and publish THE DEAD MEDIA HANDBOOK.”

The handbook would be “a book about media that have died on the barbed wire of technological advance, media that didn't make it, martyred media, dead media… a rich, witty, insightful, profusely illustrated, perfect bound, acid-free-paper coffee-table book... by some really with-it, cutting-edge early-21st century publisher. The kind of book that will appear in seventeen different sections of your local chain store: Political Affairs, Postmodern Theory, Computer Science, Popular Mechanics, Design Studies, the coffee table art book section, the remainder table.”

Bruce appealed for help collecting stories and notes about dead media, and over the next five years, notes and suggestions accumulated at deadmedia.org.

But the book never happened. The website has survived, gradually succumbing to link-rot as the Internet evolved and grew around it.

Twenty years later, Bruce’s idea is more relevant than ever. As Benedict Evans said “For the first time ever, the tech industry is selling not just to big corporations or middle-class families but to four fifths of all the adults on earth - it is selling to people who don’t have mains electricity or running water and substitute spending on cigarettes for mobile.”

The history of media is impossibly rich. For every cranky stillborn idea (“when the real hair wig on the crown of her hinged head was lifted up it contained a turntable for playing 3 1/2 inch records!”) there are successful lost media, around which industries were built, fortunes made and societies transformed.

This collection is not The Dead Media Handbook. It is a lightly edited collection of those nearly 500 notes and contributions. Inside, you’ll find lists of early mainframe computers, speculations about the multi-dimensional mental images created by Peruvian knotted-string books, details of Timothy Leary’s experiential typewriter and a lengthy analysis of the View-Master and it’s competitors.

[KentE]

Thanks, ATDrake!
I'm betting I'll enjoy this, because it's also so relevant to my interests, as a pro audio tech. (Hope I'm not going to get in trouble for violating your trademark...)

[FTL]

Thanks for the announcement! I made a number of contributions to the Dead Media Project in its early days, and even had a reporter and photographer from USA Today visit me in 1997 to do a story on some hundred-year-old dead media that I happened to have.

I've just downloaded the Kindle version and found some of my posts that I'd forgotten about!