Looking for the spaceless book, an e-publishing archaeology

Main Article Content

Alessandro Ludovico
University of Southampton, Winchester School of Art

Abstract

In the reformulation of the ‘publication’ concept after the electric and then electronic revolution, there is a consequent reformulation of the ‘space of publication’ which finally transcends the page and the binding as the insurmountable limits.Here the history of this process is tracked through the first optical attempts to compress the content in order to overcome those limits, conceptually preparing for a more radical technological shift. Foreseen in early science fiction visions, this shift determined by digital and the networked technologies, is dramatically collapsing the publication space towards a dimension close to the infinite, where the published object disappears in the reading machine, in what becomes a mere but sophisticated ‘container’.

Keywords: Publishing, Post-digital, Electronic publishing, Sci-ence fiction, Media archaeology, Digital publishing, E-reader, E-publishing, Book culture, E-literature, E-book, Electronic literature

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Asimov, I. (1951). The Fun They Had. In Boys and Girls Page, December 1951, NEA service Inc.

Borges, J. L. (1941). La biblioteca de Babel. In El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sur.

Bova, B. (1989). Cyberbooks, New York: T. Doherty Associates.

Brown, B. (1930). The Readies, transition, no. 19/20, June 1930, pp.167-73.

Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. Atlantic Month-ly, 176, July 1945, pp.101-108.

El Mundo. (2016). Ángela Ruiz Robles: Así funcionaba el precursor del 'ebook' inventado por una maestra espa-ola. El Mundo, 28 March 2016. http://www.elmundo.es/ciencia/2016/03/28/56f903ed22601d9e268b4572.html. Last access: November 2018.

Kay, A. C. (1972). A Personal Computer for Chil-dren of All Ages. In ACM '72 Proceedings of the ACM annual conference, Volume 1, Article No 1, Boston 1 August 1972. New York: ACM.

Kittler, F. A. (1990), Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, Stanford: Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens, p.369.

Lissitzky, E. (1923). The topography of typography. Merz, 4, July 1923.

Lissitzky, E., (1927). Unser Buch (U.d.S.S.R). In Alois Ruppel, ed., Gutenberg Jahrbuch. Mainz: Gu-tenberg-Gesellschaft, pp.172-178.

Shaver, Richard (1948). I Remember Lemuria, Ev-anston: Venture Books.

Spielberg, S., Dick, P. K., Frank, S., Cohen, J., Kaminski, J., Williams, J., Cruise, T., et al. (2002). Minority report [DVD].

Waldrop, F. C., & Borkin, J. (1938). Television: a struggle for power. New York: W. Morrow and Company, p.52.