The LongPen comes to Cheltenham

The LongPen was ‘invented’ by me in the summer of 2004. (I put ‘invented’ in quotation marks because of course I did not do the math or build the machine, being one of those people who doesn’t know what makes the light bulb light up when you turn it on.) It is the world’s first long-distance, real-time signing and handwriting device.

It has been a long and interesting roller-coaster ride, from agonizing melt-down moments to brilliant successes, with a certain amount of jeering and egg-throwing along the way — though I am told all this is par for the course when it comes to new inventions that strike people at first as a little crazy.

How does it work? The author (for instance, me) sits anywhere (for instance, Toronto) and interacts with people at the other end (for instance, the Cheltenham Book Festival) over a video conferencing system, and then signs or writes or draws pictures that get replicated on books or other objects (for instance, copies of The Door and Moral Disorder) at the distant location.

In other words, the LongPen is not an Autopen, which signs your name over and over without your presence being required. Instead, the LongPen does whatever you have just done at your end, including ‘Happy Birthday Marge’ and a picture of a pussycat — making whatever marks you have just made, in the order and with the pressure you have made them. (The signature is a legal one - which LongPen has just had reconfirmed by an expert in this field.)

The whole interaction can be recorded, and in the case of, for instance, book and music events, a fan can take the interaction away on a memory stick, plug it into his or her computer, and put it on his or her Facebook or other site.

And the LongPen is also very green - using it to sign things instead of flying to do so shrinks one’s carbon footprint enormously, in addition to saving a lot of time and money. On the LongPen website you can find a list of all those who have LongPenned so far, and the amount of tonnes of carbon they have saved.

The LongPen now has two models — the big one that can be used for events such as the Book Festival, and the small Business Model that can sit on a desk — and is now in the process of deploying itself. All this and much more can be learned from the website.

The LongPen is known in tech circles as a ‘disruptive technology’, which means - I’m told - that it came out of nowhere, was not anticipated, is not an enhancement of a pre-existing technology, and will radically change how things are done. Author signings are just a small part of the picture!