The “linear rate of advance” of a print head in a present-day inkjet printer is on the order of a foot per second. It covers the page in repeated passes only a fraction of an inch wide.

Suppose you could produce an inexpensive print head eight-and-a-half inches wide, which was mounted across the print carriage and did not move back and forth. In that case, you would have a color printer capable of perhaps sixty pages per minute, and, if monopoly pricing broke down, there is no reason that ink cartridge costs would have to be higher than a penny a page. The techniques involved in manufacturing OLED e-paper are equally applicable to making such a print head.

The print-head would be self-contained in its electronics. It would talk directly to the computer, presumably being able to understand PostScript, and order the printer when to turn the feed roller. This would make it comparatively easy to standardize the print-head as an interchangeable commodity part.

When you have a printer like that, the distinction between on-line and print simply breaks down. There is no reason why you should not be able to print yourself a reasonably finished-looking book.

Here’s something I did one time: I printed off a document from an on-line historical archive, having saved a copy on my computer. I folded the print-off up, stuck it in my pocket, and carried it with me to the laundromat. I read the thing, and made notes with a red pencil while “propping up the laundromat wall,” waiting for my washing to finish. I was doing scholarly research in the fullest sense of the word under conditions where I would traditionally have been expected to read a newspaper that someone else had left on the table. It was a reasonable thing to do, making good use of time which would otherwise have been wasted in boredom, but I felt very strange doing it. As a historian, I had been brought up to have something of the same attitude about archives that a Catholic priest has about the altar and sanctuary of his church. There is a sort of traditional ritual of “traveling to archives.” That is, you are supposed to go off on a tour of the country, visiting all the places where they have old papers relating to your subject. What has happened however, is that large numbers of little archives have realized that they can increase their exposure by methodically feeding everything they have through the camera, and putting it all on-line. Taken in aggregate, these small local archives add up to a very rich collection. So I sat in front of my computer, reading the documents in one window (Acrobat), and typing page-by-page comments in another window (a word processor), and methodically worked my way through several thousand pages of source material. That felt like a normal thing to do, like using a microfilm viewer in the library, only more comfortable.