The Codex Book

Linda Bennett has co-ordinated this entry. This piece is by David Parkes of Staffordshire University.

The codex book has been described as the perfect machine - power independent, extremely portable (for all but the most formidable of computing manuals), you can read it in the bath, on the train, airplane or the beach, lying down, sitting up, you can lend it, borrow one and - everyone knows how to access it and use it without too much training. But what of the book in the electronic environment? Ebooks - in fact there are very few real examples of ebooks - what exists are largely digitised texts, not really ebooks, not as we would like them to be realised anyway, not in a format which fully exploits the potential of the eworld.

Digitised texts are for the most part replicants of the print original on a screen - as one elderly scholar once said to me "why would you want to read a book from a TV screen?". Ebooks really should be a very different kind of machine, think of the potential interactions - an audio podcast of the author explaining why she created the work, moving images, film, ‘flooded’ hypertextual content - books talking to other books, writers adding content, versioning perhaps rather than editions, tag clouds, what other people have read, similar titles, new thoughts, new ideas, new contexts - all are now possible.

Wikis and Blogs offer some of this discourse, ideas can be mooted, thoughts and outputs disseminated and discussed, recorded and refined as the work evolves. As we know Wikipedia offers some of this - it has its detractors, but its ambition and vision is astounding. Could a publishing industry help deliver the much needed authoritative contributions to this world of publishing - in a participatory culture where the consumers are also producers?

Breaking the two dimensional barrier....Muriel Cooper. At the TED5 conference in 1994 “How do you retain the integrity of the information, and at the same time, retain the context and clues that allow you to traverse complex information? You are, in a sense, in an architectural construct, but you don’t have the constraints of having to believe a physical building. So you can both use the abstract conceptual issues, as well as the physical cues that people are accustomed to.”

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Posted on 20 Jun 2007 around 1pm by pageboy