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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
David Barnett

Revealed: how Hitchhiker’s Guide author predicted rise of ebooks 30 years ago

Ford Prefect (DAVID DIXON) and Arthur Dent (SIMON JONES) dressed in dressing gown on a strange planet in the classic sci-fi comedy series.
The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, written by Douglas Adams, was named after the e-book used in the classic sci-fi comedy by Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent. Photograph: BBC

Douglas Adams created the most famous ebook reader – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – almost 30 years before the first Kindle was released, but he didn’t restrict his ideas to his science fiction.

In the late 1990s, at least a decade before Amazon’s e-reader first came on to the market in 2007, the author and humorist made a series of notes uncannily predicting the rise of electronic books.

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