“56 Broken Kindle Screens is a print on demand paperback that consists of found photos depicting broken Kindle screens. The Kindle is Amazon’s e-reading device which is by default connected to the company’s book store.

The book takes as its starting point the peculiar aesthetic of broken E Ink displays and serves as an examination into the reading device’s materiality. As the screens break, they become collages composed of different pages, cover illustrations and interface elements” (blurb on Lulu).

The white frame of the page margins is a declarative act, restoring functional value to the broken devices through turning them into photographic subjects, as well as giving them the artistic value of “readymades” and transforming them into surprisingly fascinating artifacts. The images have undergone several transformations: displayed with e-ink, digitally photographed, collected online, stored in the cloud, printed on demand—or displayed again in e-ink, as there is also an e-book version that is flipped through on a Kindle Touch in a video, which gives the impression that the glitches emerge and fade into each other directly on the device itself. While these images only ever show the broken screens themselves, the book index contains the original found photos and the URLs where they were found. Most of them come from Flickr, Tumblr, blogs, and eBay, where many broken Kindles are offered.

Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg’s print-on-demand book was also available in a special edition of fifty-six numbered and signed copies at an exhibition at Link Art Center in Brescia (Italy, 2013). The book served as inspiration for an assignment as part of Danny Snelson’s 2015 course “Print-on-Demand Poetry: Making Books After the Internet” at Northwestern University.