Douglas Adams created the most famous ebook reader – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – almost 30 years before the first Kindle was released, but he didn't restrict his ideas to his science fiction. In the late 1990s, at least a decade before Amazon's e-reader first came on to the market in 2007, the author and humorist made a series of notes uncannily predicting the rise of electronic books. But Adams, who died in 2001, did not live to see his musings, spread over three A4 pages, become reality. He wrote: "Lots of resistance to the idea of ebooks from the public. Particularly all those people who 10 years ago said they couldn't see any point typing on a computer. "I believe this resistance will gradually disappear as the electronic book itself improves and becomes smaller, lighter, simpler, cheaper, in other words more like a book." Adams's notes are presented in their original handwritten form in a new book, 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams. Featuring unseen material from Adams's personal archive, including notes, letters, speeches, fanmail and unused sections of his most famous work, The Hitchhiker's Guide, it has been put together by Kevin Jon Davies, who first met Adams in 1978 to interview him for a fanzine. Davies gained access to Adams's archived material held at St John's College, Cambridge to assemble a suitably eclectic insight into the writer's thoughts, processes and ideas. He describes Adams as "a man fascinated by technology" and both an "advocate for conservation and a forward thinking innovator". "His ideas in his writing, articles and speeches were often arguably ahead of their time," says Davies. "The three pages of notes which are Douglas's thoughts on the future possibilities of electronic books and publishing date from the late 1990s, and the musings are well ahead of Kindles and other ebooks.