going digital: the book, but not as we know it?

This page points to online and offline resources about the book in the age of the internet.

It covers -

• the environment
• devices
• books online?
• readers
• authors and reviewers
• money and publishers
• long-term access
• studies

     the environment 

As suggested in the more detailed Electronic Publishing guide, books appear to be doing quite well - despite sneers that "dried treeflakes encased in dead cow" - are about to become extinct.

The real 'crisis' appears to be in publishing, although studies highlighted on the Ketupa site suggest that the death of the publisher has been a lament since at least the 1960s. The 'golden age of publishing' was always one just before your own generation.

     studies 

Geoffrey Nunberg's The Future of the Book (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1996) collects papers presented at the San Marino conference of the same name, highly disputatious but full of insights and usefully sceptical about the theoretical delirium apparent in much of the discussion of 'new media' from the school of McLuhan & Marcuse. 

Nunberg's essay on The Place of Books In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction appeared in the traditional analogue format in Future Libraries (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1994), edited by Howard Bloch & Carla Hesse.

Our Being Digital guide recommended the essays in Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991) edited by Michael Benedikt. 

Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word (Chicago: Chicago Uni Press 1993) is a useful introduction to some of the debates about hypertext and the future of the book. A more in-depth exploration is provided by Hypermedia & Literary Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press 1991) edited by Paul Delany & George Landow.

The latter's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory & Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1992) provides one of the best accounts of hypertext's uses and a coherent - if for us somewhat na�ve - argument from the Gospel of St McLuhan for hypertext as a means of social empowerment. While it's replete with assertions that "hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice" - similar to claims of the innately democratic/liberating nature of blogs - it does highlight the nature of hypertext, something frequently forgotten by web designers. Michael Heim's Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1987) is provocative.

Jay David Bolter's The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext & the History of Writing (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum 1991) and Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press 1999) - the latter coauthored with Richard Grusin -  have been influential books in arguing that books and electronic media are fundamentally different.

The Book & the Computer (BC) is an online journal that provides a forum for debate on the future of the book. It includes articles about online bookselling, print-on-demand technology, electronic books and the future of reading. 



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