From an interview at Guernica about technology and art with critic Paul Stephens, a passage about Bob Brown’s proposal eight decades ago for an e-reader:

“Guernica: 

Information overload is a hot topic; we all struggle with being bombarded. You look backwards to Gertrude Stein, Stéphane Mallarmé, Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot—at the way the modernists who were also on the cusp of a technology explosion dealt with information and how it was conveyed via new channels. Some, like Stein, embraced this bombardment; others, like Pound and Eliot, did not. How can we return to Stein and relate that to having an iPhone?

Paul Stephens: 

A major impetus for the book was my research on Bob Brown, who described a pocket reading machine in 1930. A friend and disciple of Stein, Brown was thinking about the new technologies of microfilm and sound film, and the possibility that it would soon be possible to transmit poem texts instantaneously by means of radio. He put together an anthology that asked poets to write what he called ‘readies,’ parallel to the ‘talkies,’ which had just revolutionized film. The anthology included writers like Stein, Pound, William Carlos Williams, and the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, and probed how poetry would change if it were sped up. He was never able to construct the device, but did publish the anthology.

Amazingly enough, it was prophetic of some of the developments we’ve seen with smartphones. For instance, they got rid of punctuation and compressed words—a lot of the poems looked like textese, a sub-language we’re now increasingly familiar with. Bob Brown claimed to get the idea from reading Stein’s Tender Buttons on Wall Street in 1914 and looking at a stock ticker at the same time, which is just mind-blowing to me. The stock ticker was an extraordinary invention—essentially a horizontal scroll that conveyed instantaneous price data over long distances in real time, not unlike Stein’s notion of a ‘continuous present.’ The fractured, cubist syntax of Stein seemed like language in motion to Brown. He thought her modernist experiments were a parallel development to reading facilitated by machines, and he predicted that our pace of reading would accelerate.”