Picture a spine stuffed with cables, and raised lettering that starts to sing when you run your hand across the page. Asked like that, the question in the headline is obviously a provocation, and I'd rather own it straight away. The people behind Hyperpress couldn't care less about predicting where the book is headed. What keeps them up at night is far more basic, the kind of question that sounds naive until you actually try to answer it: what is a book, really?

Source: hyperpre.ss / Metally 3D printed book.

A printing press, knocked sideways

Darius Ou runs his own studio in Singapore, where he moves between type, motion, visual identities and art direction. Since 2021 he has also been leading Hyperpress, a research programme that sits somewhere between 3D printing, graphic design and publishing, part of which he developed during a master's at the University of the Arts Singapore.

The starting point is easy enough to explain, and a lot harder to get your head around. Hyperpress treats 3D printing as a descendant of the printing press, a parallel branch of print history that never quite got its chance. The team is clear that they aren't chasing some revolution in materials. They want to change how we think about print in the first place. What happens to graphic design once you're printing the page itself, rather than whatever ends up on it?

So far, six books have come out of that question, and three of them are now in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum and the V&A in London. I've picked three to walk you through, because between them they show how far the research stretches. Stick around for the last one: it's by far the most uncanny.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Darius Ou

Corpus: when the machine's traces become the design

Corpus is the loudest of the lot, with its toxic green cover and pages drenched in orange, purple and acid green. Still, it's the texture that got me. Up close, some sections look as if they'd been stitched by hand, which is a strange thing to take in when you know no needle went anywhere near it. What you're actually seeing are strands of printed material deliberately left hanging in mid-air, and they form counter-shapes that read almost like embroidery.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Corpus 3D printed book.

Any manufacturer would file that under defects. Here it becomes the graphic language of the whole book. Hyperpress describes Corpus as a work about materiality and mortality, a reflection on the afterlife of the codex, and it has since entered the permanent collection of the Singapore Art Museum.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Corpus 3D printed book.

Metally: a science-fiction book made real

Metally (2025) was built around a single scene. In "Ylla", one of the stories in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, a Martian sits reading a metal book covered in raised hieroglyphs; he runs his hand over it the way you might play a harp, and the book begins to sing. Hyperpress read that passage as a brief, and took it literally.

The full text of the story is in there. Under certain lines, conductive TPU traces are printed straight into the pages and wired to touch sensors, so when your fingers land on the text, the book answers with sound. Tucked inside a spine and cover printed in steel-infused PLA, you'll find a microcontroller, a small speaker and an e-ink display. Even the typefaces were drawn specifically for extrusion printing, using a technique the team calls path-trapping, which keeps each letter upright while it's being built, layer after layer. Reading it ends up being as much about touch as it is about sight.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Metally 3D printed book.

Before we get to the last one, a quick detour through the e-book. Buy a digital book and what lands on your device is text: the words travel, while the object stays wherever it was made. Hyperpress turned that around and asked what would happen if the object could travel too.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Metally 3D printed book.

Manual: a book that carries its own instructions

Manual came out in 2026, developed with researcher Benson Chong, and it's the most conceptual of the three (probably the most elegant as well). It's a pale pink monochrome block of 26 TPU pages, printed in one continuous run with what's called an XY-for-Z method. In plain terms, the print head works sideways, which means the book comes off the machine already bound and doesn't need any finishing afterwards.

Then you open it and find excerpts of its own G-code, the machine instructions that were used to print it. Only around 2.5% of the code made it onto the pages. To include all of it, the book would need more pages, which would mean more code, which would mean more pages again, and you can see where that goes. It's a manual for making the manual, and that loop is the whole point.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Manual 3D printed book.

Hyperpress calls this an r-book, short for replicable book. Where an e-book sends you the text, an r-book sends you the text and the form. To prove it, they launched Manual in Toronto, at New Systems, by sending the file over from Singapore and printing it on the spot. Patreon subscribers can get hold of the print file, and a limited run of 40 copies is now available, with a few already acquired by the V&A Museum, Harvard University’s Houghton Library and University of the Arts London Libraries.

Source: hyperpre.ss / Manual 3D printed book.

So, is this the future of the book?

Of course not, and I suspect you'd figured that out by the end of the first paragraph. Darius says as much himself: Hyperpress has never been about mass production, and it has never claimed it would turn publishing on its head. These books exist as one-offs or in limited editions.

That still leaves the sore point, which is the material. Consumer 3D printing leans heavily on plastic, and Hyperpress openly admits that moving away from it is hard for now. They have tried other routes, a polymer mixed with wood pulp for On the Nature of Volumes, for instance, but the research was always about the additive process, less so about material revolution. Swapping paper for plastic was never the plan, but it is with hope that a more environmentally and ecologically sustainable material can be utilised for 3D printing in the near future.

Which is precisely why their work deserves more than a quick scroll. The questions they raise turn out to be oddly practical. Could a page work as a circuit? Could a book travel as a file and turn back into an object on the other side of the world?

The printed book isn't dying. Watching it get questioned this carefully, though, reminds you of something that's easy to forget: print has always been a technology, and technology is there to be pushed.

Anyway, get your culture fix.

Words and research: Douy @douy.alapomme