Quotation about the future of technology being paper

Question

I've been looking for a quotation for some time now and it bugs me.

A sci-fi author was asked what the information technology of the future would be and he described a tech with lots of benefits, e.g., doesn't break when it falls on the floor, incredible high resolution, so cheap you can throw it away, etc. When asked when we will have this technology available he said that we already have it -- it's paper.

Not sure, but the author might have been Isaac Asimov, it might have also been apocryphal.

Has anyone seen such a quotation anywhere? I'm looking for the exact quotation and/or the source.

Answer 1

You're thinking of Asimov's essay "The Ancient and the Ultimate". It was originally published in the January 1973 edition of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It was later republished in The Tragedy of the Moon (or here), one of Asimov's essay collections, and later in Asimov on Science.

The essay is referenced in the Isaac Asimov FAQ on Asimov Online:

What is the title of the essay that Asimov wrote concerning the ultimate self-contained, portable, high-tech reading device of the future which turns out to be a book? Where can I find it?

The title of the essay is "The Ancient and the Ultimate". It was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in January 1973, and appeared in the Doubleday collections The Tragedy of the Moon (1973) and Asimov on Science (1989).

The essay is written as a response to the idea that video cassettes might replace books. The essay explores the idea of cassettes and players being improved to the point of perfection (smaller batteries, better displays, etc) and concludes that the perfect cassette player is a book.

This page has some quotes from the essay:

You’ll have to admit that such a cassette would be a perfect futuristic dream: self-contained, mobile, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private, and largely under the control of the will.

Ah, but dreams are cheap so let’s get practical. Can such a cassette possibly exist? To this, my answer is Yes, of course. The next question is: How many years will we have to wait for such a deliriously perfect cassette?

I have an answer for that, too, and a quite definite one. We will have it in minus five thousand years–because what I have been describing… is a book!

Some other pages talking about the essay:

• https://ruswornom.wordpress.com/category/the-ancient-and-the-ultimate/
• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7680345
• http://www.librarything.com/topic/20415

Answer 2

Isaac Asimov has written a short story along these lines, The Holmes-Ginsbook Device, first published in 1968 in If magazine. Here's a short summary:

There's a 1968 Isaac Asimov story called “The Holmes-Ginsbook Device”, set in a world of advanced digital reading technology. The title's two innovators devise an ingenious system of printing page images and assembling them into a kind of codex, a physical entity that needs only hands and eyes to read. Of course the inventors are unfairly forgotten when the device bearing their names is shortened by popular usage to "book".
_Source