How much some things have changed since the 1996 publication of Nicholas Negroponte’s bestselling book, Being Digital, can be measured by a snippet from a contemporaneous review by Roy Johnson. Near the end of it, Mr. Johnson pokes a little fun at some of Negroponte’s more outlandish predictions:

However, if you can steel yourself against his breathless rush, one or two of the arguments can be made to tremble a little with some applied clear thinking. He [Negroponte] supposes for instance that writers would earn more if their work were distributed digitally (smaller profits, bigger sales). But would you want to download then print off a 500 page book to avoid the publisher’s price-tag? (This is already possible from databases such as Project Gutenberg.) Why have your edition of Moby Dick on 600 loose sheets of A4 when Penguin will supply a bound copy for less than the price of a gin-and-tonic? Nevertheless, this is just one small idea amongst many that he throws off in a series of elegantly catenated chapters.

Applying clear thinking to the future ain’t what it used to be. The idea that readers would forgo paper and ink to read Moby Dick on a Kindle, Sony Reader, iPhone, iPad, or a flood of competing devices was apparently not in plain sight at the end of the last century.

The hook in the Times’s weirdly anachronistic report on Friday, “Roll-Up Computers and Their Kin” —- “‘The paper book is dead,’ says the digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte” —- is less clairvoyant than it is an echo of today’s conventional wisdom.

And this prediction —- “Some computer developers envision tablet computers so flexible that you will literally be able to roll them up and slip them in your bag or pocket — just as you would do with a newspaper or magazine today — and then unfurl them on the train” — will strike even benighted technophobes (present) as similarly dated. The Christian Science Monitor reported in 2004 that “Next digital screen could fold like paper” and “They eventually could be made of a pliable, polymer backing that resembles paper.”

E-Ink, a pioneer of “smart paper,” has moved past the envisioning stage to begin creating the stuff, as this Inquirer report details

The Times closes with a quote from Clive Thompson, “science and technology writer and columnist for Wired magazine,” who “foresees e-book publishers offering single chapters of some books for 99 cents each, the price for which iTunes sells single songs today.”

Back to the future, indeed.

You can “start reading Moby Dick …on your Kindle in under a minute” via Amazon —- for precisely nothing ($0.00).