Thanks to the printing press, during the 16th century, a type of publication known as chapbooks started to proliferate. Different names were used in different countries: "pliego suelto" in Spain, "livre bleu" in France, "volksbuch" in Germany, "libri da risma" in Italy, and so on. This publications ranged from a folded loose sheet to books composed of several printed, folded and unbounded pages.

This street literature was a mean of information, entertainment and outreach among ordinary people. The contents were varied and ranged from a song or poem to the account of curreant events. There were general publications and more specialized publications aimed at certain sectors.

Contrary to what we can think, chapbooks were produced on a non negligible scale in view of the resources of the time as well as the literacy of the people, which was not as large as nowadays. In 1520s the Oxford bookseller John Dorne recorded in his day-book the sale of up to 190 ballads a day, the inventory of the stock of The Sign of the Three Bibles on London Bridge in 1664, included books and printed sheets to make approximately 90,000 chapbooks and 37,500 ballads sheets. The inventory of The Sign of the Looking Glass, also on the London Bridge in 1707, recorded 31,000 books, in addition to 257 reams of printed sheets. A conservative estimate of sales in Scotland in the second half of the 18th century was over 200,000 per year¹

During the 20th century, and especially throughout its lastest three decades thanks to the invention of the Xerox machine, the fanzines made their appearance, which are, as a general rule, a group of xeroxed sheets of paper, folded in half with a cardboard cover and binded with stapels. Fanzines were essential to disseminate what was known as counterculture.

Although there are cases of fanzines that were so successful that they ended up becoming magazines² and that the fanzine phenomenon was so large that there were some of them created and managed by large corporations (such as the well-known fanzine "U Don't Stop" that was part of a Nike advertising campaign), commonly these publications were a one person (or a very small group) operations, with a more or less short lifespan.

As the Chapbooks of the previous centuries, fanzines were about many different things: literature, comics, music, politics, etc. Some were more specialized than others and there were even fanzines about only one band or musician like the fanzine "exclusively Elvis".

Later, with the coming of BBS, the first ezines appeared. Usually, they were files in plain ASCII text format. One of the oldest and still alive is Phrack³. The coming of the Internet continued to drive the ezine phenomenon and a little later, with the coming of blogs first and "social" networks later, people had the potential chance to publish and share their things on an unprecedented scale. During this time some fanzines became digital and many others simply disappeared (as it happened to many magazines and newspapers).

As we've seen technological progress such as the printing press and the Xerox machines made it easier for people to publish their own things and avoid all kinds of censorship. At the very end of the last century and the very beginning of the current one, with the coming of the Internet, there was an optimism for all things digital, the revolution that would be the Internet for regular people.

Three decades later all that's left of that promise of the Internet, of that utopia, are shattered pieces. From the technological progress has emerged a terrifying reality of corporations and corrupt governments willing to destroy everything just to increase their benefits, and increasingly confident in creating a new totalitarian and dystopic world order, in which they can keep doing what they like by subjugating the masses without any interference or resistance. The technology that had to make us free has turned out to be the one that is being used to put chains on us.

We can see every day how the Internet, and especially the web, has become a hostile place where private groups of unpresentable people can block web pages at their will⁴, where publications and ebooks are removed, written and rewritten according to the tastes, affinities and purposes of certain groups and organized interests⁵, where the cancellation culture used by the Nazis and the communists one hundred years ago is the norm, and where the so-called AI scans the entire web 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, stealing everything from everyone without paying a dime⁶.

People are starting to react to all this nonsense. The physical⁷ and offline⁸ is back in fashion and is valued because it really has value. A physical object will always generate a better experience than a virtual one because we humans have multiple senses. A physical object has a lot more options to survive and endure in time than a virtual one, proof of this are all those previous centuries chapbooks that are still with us, while we've already lost forever a large amount of digital content of a few years ago despite the efforts to preserve it. A physical and/or offline object is not as likely to be blocked, interfered, spied, stolen and manipulated as a virtual or online one. You can rewrite the text of an amazon kindle ebook and reupload it silently, but you can't rewrite my physical copy of George Orwell's 1984 published more than 30 years ago. It is and will be here, unchanged and unalterable, for current and future generations.n

In view of all this and taking into account how easy is to have access to a printer nowadays, it is not surprising that people are gradually returning to the dissemination of their thoughts, crafts and arts in the good old printed form, in chapbooks⁹ and fanzines¹⁰, because sharing our thoughts, our opinions and our creations freely is an inherent need of human beings and not a thing for machines.