What is a book?

I have been so immersed in a book culture that even the notion of defining the book at first struck me as a ridiculous question when I first started thinking about it a few years ago. A book is a book. It’s printed. It exists between two covers. It’s static. Yet we are all becoming involved in the redefinition of the book. 

The question of what the book is transforms into a question of what we need it to be, and then, what can a book be? I think some of the ‘games’ that my children ‘read/play’ should be marketed to parents as the new form of the book, because that’s really what they have become – game series like Assassin’s Creed and The Elder Scrolls. They await the new releases just as I await the latest books from my favorite authors. They immerse themselves in the plot, unlock the narrative and experience the story through film, text, music and by creating the action with their playing. 

Literature – fiction and non-fiction -  is how we tell each other stories and create a shared experience and understanding. As our reading moves online, and we explore the text plus world to enhance our reading experience, it is going to become richer. But as Glenn’s son said, the experience of moving through text and following new information can take you places that you didn’t expect to reach. One thing about the 19^th century book, you could always return to your earlier experience and relive it;Chapter three stayed put and you could go back to it. I find myself longing for a way to put an electronic lock on my online experiences so I can readily re-access them. Like the Hotel project that Coover describes, it can be disconcerting to find that your favorite character has left the digital world, never to be found again. It reminds me of a Zen haiku bit of internet humor that circulated a while back – positing that Microsoft Error messages should be replaced with haiku:

With searching comes loss

And the presence of absence:

"My Novel" not found.

So the answer to what a book is and what it will become also depends on where and what its purpose is – is it an electronic textbook, an e-art book (and wow, does that definition change from the old coffee table book notion of an artbook), a novel for mass consumption, or a game-like experience? There’s still a mass market, and I wonder if readers will become exhausted by the new opportunities. 

I went down a Peter Robinson rabbit hole while reading Jared Jenisch. Robinson writes in WHERE WE ARE WITH ELECTRONIC SCHOLARLY EDITIONS, AND WHERE WE WANT TO BE and would just end with a quote from him on scholary texts and how hypertext transforms us from readers into editors:

“Scholarly editing has for centuries distinguished between editors and readers: we, the editors, are gifted with special access to the materials, and we are licensed by the academy to make editions which you, the readers, accept. This [hyperlinked] approach attacks this distinction. All readers may become editors too, and all editors are readers before they are editors. This does not propose that all readers should become editors all the time: most of us will be content to accept, most of the time, what Gabler tells us about Ulysses, or Werner tells us about Dickinson. But any good reader must sometimes be an editor. Gaps may also appear in other barriers, long present within the academy: that between documentary and critical editing, that between textual scholarship and literary scholarship. We are all engaged in the business of understanding: distributed editions fashioned collaboratively may become the ground of our mutual enterprise.”

The end of books?

I keep reading and my reflections keep changing.  Robert Coover's article about a class in writing novels using hypertext in the 1990s suggests that e-books that use hypertext can't be read in print.  The non-linear format does not fit the linear format of what many of us recognize as a book.  It's interesting that he does refer to my concern about technology changes: " its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old." para 19. 

An interesting question he raises is one of closure. When does the story end and if an author writes a hypertext novel, are they obligated to keep the story going?

I recall a History of the Novel class I studied in university where we looked at how stories were told in the beginning and how that has changed.

Perhaps hypertext novels are a new genre. We're not just talking about taking a 'print' novel and putting it into electronic format, although that has been my limited  understanding until now.