P–DPA log

[...] a book is a different object every time it is instantiated or read, be it by a human or machinic entity; they become part of the apparatus of the book, a performative apparatus.

Starting with the CD-ROM era of the 1990s, the development of “enhanced” ebooks, usually with multimedia elements, has seemed to be a natural evolution. Yet the industry has struggled with early commercial and artistic failures, suggesting that consumers don’t want or need multimedia content — such enhancements may be distracting. There is widespread concern that a multimedia ebook is not “enhanced” in any way, and that it is actually inferior to its quieter, static counterpart. I propose that digital-only additions to texts should pass a two-fold test of utility. First, such additions should be *immersive*: they should appear to be natural extensions of the work, satisfying the curiousity of readers at the moment that these curiousities naturally arrive in the course of consuming the text. Enhancements must also be *nontrivial*. Loading up a reference work with links to Google Maps or Wikipedia offers little value the reader could not obtain independently. Primary source material, topics not easily discoverable via search engines, or deeply curated dives into ancillary topics represent rewarding additions that readers will want to explore.

Those multiple output versions are like snapshots of the underlying XML source, generated at a particular point in time. And because creating those snapshots is automated, it can be done on-demand, any time that the source XML changes. There are strong similarities to software development in that approach—programmers write and revise plain-text computer code, then “compile” that code into a program or application. Our DocBook XML is like the source code, and the output formats are like the applications. Software developers spend more time than just about anyone writing, editing, and collaborating on complex long-form text documents, so it makes sense to borrow and adapt some of the tools and techniques they use to make that task more manageable.

[...] the way the past of the book is perceived by a specific thinker or group of thinkers, not only casts a light on how they perceive what the present and future of the book could or should be (as well as which issues will be most important in determining the future of the book); it also influences directly and materially both the object of the book and the discursive practices accompanying the book (and with that, it will directly influence scholarly communication in the case of the monograph).

[...] hypertextualizing a text produces not an electronic book but a miniature electronic library.

Books, I conclude, are not a hide bound alternative to the freedoms of the multiply linked items of hypertext, but an important social, political, and historical solution to the problems raised by the particularity of such linked items.

The popularity of hypermedia on the World Wide Web shows that much of the rhetoric of hypertext is quite inaccurate and ineffectual. Text is not being decomposed into Barthean *lexias*; rather very conventional whole documents, with much of their authority and their material origins putatively ascertainable, are being linked. Divisions between author and reader, producer and consumer are being technologically enforced.

The book is a slow form of exchange. It is a mode of temporality which conceives of public communication not as action but rather as reflection upon action. Indeed, the book form serves precisely to defer action, to widen the temporal gap between thought and deed, to create a space for reflection and debate. The book, as Marcel Proust recognized, is a fulcrum that creates space out of time.

Last week I stumbled upon a freshly photocopied zine, lying on a friend's sofa in Helsinki and thought: this is the future, reshaped from the past.

Industry pressures have led digital publishing to create a poor simulacrum of the book form – notably the eBook, which degrades or completely loses the typographic or mnemonic qualities of the paper book: page number, folios, speed of browsing, typographic detail of fonts and kerning etc.

The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.