Douglas Adams created the most famous ebook reader – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – almost 30 years before the first Kindle was released, but he didn’t restrict his ideas to his science fiction.
In the late 1990s, at least a decade before Amazon’s e-reader first came on to the market in 2007, the author and humorist made a series of notes uncannily predicting the rise of electronic books.
But Adams, who died in 2001, did not live to see his musings, spread over three A4 pages, become reality. He wrote: “Lots of resistance to the idea of ebooks from the public. Particularly all those people who 10 years ago said they couldn’t see any point typing on a computer.
“I believe this resistance will gradually disappear as the electronic book itself improves and becomes smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, in other words more like a book.”
Adams’s notes are presented in their original handwritten form in a new book, 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams.
Featuring unseen material from Adams’s personal archive, including notes, letters, speeches, fanmail and unused sections of his most famous work, The Hitchhiker’s Guide, it has been put together by Kevin Jon Davies, who first met Adams in 1978 to interview him for a fanzine.
Davies gained access to Adams’s archived material held at St John’s College, Cambridge to assemble a suitably eclectic insight into the writer’s thoughts, processes and ideas.
He describes Adams as “a man fascinated by technology” and both an “advocate for conservation and a forward thinking innovator”.
“His ideas in his writing, articles and speeches were often arguably ahead of their time,” says Davies. “The three pages of notes which are Douglas’s thoughts on the future possibilities of electronic books and publishing date from the late 1990s, and the musings are well ahead of Kindles and other ebooks. Douglas, having years earlier predicted this industry with The Hitchhiker’s Guide itself, would sadly not live to see the concepts actually realised in the kinds of devices we all now take so much for granted.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide had several iterations – first in 1978 as a radio series, then a novel, a 1981 TV series, and then in stage adaptations, a computer game and a movie in 2005.
At the heart of everything was the book, an indispensable electronic rough guide to the universe that had only two words to say about Earth: “Mostly harmless”.
The fictional guide was a far more advanced gadget than the technology could offer at the time he wrote his notes on ebooks, which is why Adams suspected there would be much public resistance to the idea.
He said: “One other crucial area in which it must improve radically and I think this is the key one. A book, typically, has a resolution of between 600 and 2,400dpi [dots per square inch]. A computer screen has about 74. It’s not comfortable to read. When I’ve finished a day’s work on the computer I print the stuff out and go and sit on the sofa to read it. When resolution improves that – coupled with a screen that is backlit – will, I believe, change a lot of attitudes very quickly.”
The most recent version of the Kindle, released less than a year ago, has a screen resolution of 300 pixels per square inch, as does its rival the Kobo Forma.
In February 2001, just three months before he died aged 49 from a heart attack, Adams addressed a convention in Cannes on mobile phone technology – then in its relative infancy.
His speech, reproduced in his typewritten notes in the book, envisions a world where mobile phones are not just used for making calls, and predicts the rise of connectivity and smartphones. He said: “Let them be smart about what’s around them and let them find ways of communicating.
“No cables. No configuration. Let’s see how far Bluetooth can take us. Let phones communicate with computers, with televisions, with radios – oh, and particularly with cars. I want my car radio to become a hands-free phone device by the mere action of carrying my phone into my car.”
In the book’s foreword, Stephen Fry, Adams’s friend since the 1980s, and the narrator of the audiobook of The Hitchhiker’s Guide writes: “It’s dreadful to think you never pinched and zoomed on a smartphone or tablet, never engaged with an AI chatbot, never said ‘Fuck off, Alexa’, never tweeted, never Facebooked, FaceTimed or Skyped. Of course, you wouldn’t have been surprised by a single one of these developments, the intrusions on our lives that have so transformed the world since you so precipitately left it. You saw them all coming.”
