overview revolutions publishing retailing reading technologies illustration going digital journals bodies

going digital: the book, but not as we know it? This page of the briefing is currently under development. We'll be adding detailed pointers to online and offline resources in coming weeks.    Studies  Geoffrey Nunberg's The Future of the Book (Uni of California Press, Berkeley 96) 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 94), edited by Howard Bloch & Carla Hesse. Our Being Digital guide recommended the essays in Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MIT Press 91) edited by Michael Benedikt.  Richard Lanham's The Electronic Word (Chicago, Chicago Uni Press 93) 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 91) edited by Paul Delany & George Landow. The latter's Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory & Technology (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Uni Press 92) provides one of the best accounts of hypertext's uses and a coherent - if somewhat naïve - 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" - indeed - it does highlight the nature of hypertext, something frequently forgotten by web designers.  Jay David Bolter's The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext & the History of Writing (Mahwah, Lawrence Erlbaum 91) and Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MIT Press 99) - 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.       next page  (journals)