Alexis Madrigal over at The Atlantic has a fun dissection of Microsoft’s 1999 magazine ad campaign which featured predictions for ebooks in the 21st century.
John Overholt, a curator of early modern books and manuscripts at Harvard University, posted the ads to Flickr and tweeted them out yesterday.
Some were way off the mark, like the prediction for 2001 that, “Electronic textbooks appear and help reduce backpack load on students.” As Madrigal notes, the eTextbook market was hardly anything to speak of in 2001.
Others predictions were amazingly on target: “2010: eBook devices weigh half a pound, run 24 hours, and hold as many as a million titles.” Sounds like a Kindle to me. [The Atlantic]
