espositoj@att.net- 3 -form, the print package gets tossed out and only the content remains. Is an ebook (or e-Â book or eBook) the content, the device that displays it, or both? Some interested partiesnow use the term
etextÂ
to distinguish the content from its package. This would be morehelpful if enough people subscribed to the convention. What I will call
books
are texts or etexts or content. This kind of book is the same whether it is displayed in a handsomely bound hardcover book, within a Web browser, as an Adobe PDF file, or in MicrosoftReader (among a multitude of other formats). By this definition, the book of the futurewill be a . . . book!Here we should note that once we separate a book's content from its hardcopy package, the notion of what is "book-length" disappears. A very short book is likely to beabout 120 pages, which comes to about 40,000 words. Most books are roughly threetimes that length, and those long, gooey novels you curl up with on the beach can betwice that again--well over 200,000 words. I am drafting this document just after completing a commercial novel of about a half-million words, and I enjoyed every one of them. The connection between the physical book and our sense of a book-length idea isimportant because the literal physical package has come to define what we mean by awell-thought-out argument or story--because such an idea would fill the pages of a book.In other words, the accident of the convenient size of a single volume has served to createan arbitrary image of an intellectual category; the medium in this case has served todefine the message. But in electronic form, anything goes. A book (probably better torefer to it as a
text,
though that term lacks the historical resonance ofÂ
bookÂ
) could bemillions of words long or it could be a simple e-mail of a few lines: no particular lengthserves to define what is meant by a complete idea and the physical display of such a book or text (whether on a computer screen, a personal digital assistant, or whatever) isthoroughly agnostic when it comes to meaning. It would be interesting to speculate whatit will mean culturally to lose the sense of a well-developed idea when such an idea is nolonger hardwired to paper and ink. Throughout this essay I use the term
bookÂ
to refer totexts of any length.
I
Before we have a processed book, however, we must have a traditional book, a primal book, an utterance that precedes or has escaped the bureaucratization andsystematization of the modern world. The primal book is a curiously romantic myth thata number of otherwise skeptical and dispassionate people (mostly authors) cling tounreflectively. The primal book is usually written by a single author, someone who hasSomething to Say. The author's job is to get it out, to get it on paper. It is a serious task.It requires a serious person. To assert the seriousness of the effort, the author may rent agarret and embrace poverty; even more reckless souls may teach at a university. It is aspiritual mission. It is hoped that the author's creation will ultimately be wrapped in theappropriate robes of ritual: a stiff hardcover binding with a glossy dust jacket, acid-free paper, perhaps a colophon page, with extra points for deckle edge. The most importantaspect of the primal book, however, is its air of authenticity. The author, the creator, hasmade the book in his image. Such a book is a bit of the inner life of the author broughtinto the world for all to admire.
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