In 1981, Roger Fidler wrote a visionary essay on the emergence of mobile reading devices like the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle. CJR’s Curtis Brainard talked to Fidler, who now runs the Reynolds Journalism Institute’s Digital Publishing Alliance, about his early predictions and the journalism industry’s long and fitful involvement in the development of tablets and e-readers.
Curtis Brainard: What inspired your 1981 essay?
Roger Fidler: At the time, I was the director of design for what became the first online service in the U.S., Viewtron. It was essentially an experiment by Knight-Ridder to see what kind of interest there would be in online access to news and information. It was a very sophisticated system for its time. Back in the late seventies and early eighties lots of people were already talking about digital technology replacing print.
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