Broken 56 Broken Kindle Screens was the “first experiment with critical destruction” in Danny Snelson’s first course devoted entirely to print-on-demand practices, “Print on Demand Poetry: Making Books After the Internet,” at Northwestern University in 2015. It responds to 56 Broken Kindle Screens by Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg (2012), a collection of found photographs showing broken displays of Kindle e-readers.

The students were asked to collectively alter a copy of this book by creasing and damaging it, punching pages, writing on or drawing over them, crossing out pictures, or transforming pictures by crossing out eyes and so on, with the aim of understanding the book “as an object, with a specific set of material properties and resistances to destruction—a kind of ‘hands-on’ learning” (Danny Snelson, Edit Publications website). This demolished copy was then scanned in poor quality by Snelson and turned into a print-on-demand book again. Snelson describes the lesson as follows: “Subject to these manifold damages, in the end, Broken 56 Broken Kindle Screens proves the resilience of the book. Unlike the Kindle, a very difficult thing to break” (Danny Snelson, “Grey Libraries”).