How Would You Explain The Kindle To Charles Dickens?

Tasked with the assignment of explaining something modern or internet-related to to someone who died before 1900, Rachel Walsh decided to demonstrate the Kindle to Dickens. Creating 40 mini books of Dickens’ favourite titles, they were placed inside a hardback.

“I made the book start to finish over five days, and it took about 35 hours to make I reckon. It was pretty painstaking cutting out all the gaps in the book itself, and making the books to go inside. They’re all bound like actual books, so as I waited for them to glue and dry I would design the covers for them. All the covers are copies of real book covers. They include many of Dickens’s novels, his favourite childhood books, and some of my own.”

This is often something I wonder about, particularly when trying to describe services like Twitter to my folks. What olden-day products or services would you use as an analogy for the stuff you use today? TiVo, for example – how would you explain that to Shakespeare? [Rachel Walsh via Gamma Squad via My Rusty Sieve via Neatorama]