The Gutenberg paradigm is over there are digital mirrors everywhere. Controlled reproduction of print has been replaced by billions of cameras and software that mirror content wherever people want to see it and potentially reembody it. The network can echo a publication with its own unpredictable space and time. But the role of the digital in the material space of information would be to transcend our physical boundaries and connect physical spaces, rather than continue to expand the endless digital spaces.
From two of my artist friends, I received a forged copy of my previous book, Post-Digital Print, that was photocopied and spiral bound. They found it by chance and bought it from a stand at an artist book fair in Mexico City. When asked, the owner replied that he liked the book but that it would have been too expensive to sell there if he had imported original copies and that his small economy had not hurt the book business. Actually, I consider this gesture a major acknowledgment. This is an example of how an invisible digital mirror mirrors a publication elsewhere, deciding autonomously on the form of materiality, the space and time of distribution, and introducing it into a local publishing ecology.
The space of a publication’s physical distribution is still a value, mainly because of higher costs, lower support, and specific logistics. It cannot simply be replaced by digital distribution, because it allows for a physical exchange between author, publisher, and reader and takes place in a nondigital time, a slower time, conditioned and reinforced by the law of gravity, and in a nondigital space that is the same as the one we move in and very different from the alienated space our eyes follow on screens.