Are We Currently Experiencing the end of the as we

know

it?*

Erencan Gokcek
#33208878
MA Digital Media 2010/11 MC71072A Technology and Cultural Form Assignment

*Words are dispersed intentionally.

Are We Currently Experiencing the end of the book as we know it?

Table of Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................................................3 The New Possibilities and Open Access..................................................................................7 Copyright and Free Circulation of the Text.........................................................................10 A Question Concerning University and Academic Text......................................................12 Academic Authority and Papercentrism..............................................................................15 From Text to Hypertext: From author to Death of the Author.......................................17 The Army of the Imam.............................................................................................................20 Final Comments......................................................................................................................22 Bibliography............................................................................................................................25

Word Cloud generated with the text written in this article. Size emphasize the frequency of the word used.

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Are We Currently Experiencing the end of the book as we know it?

Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal T.S. Elliot A good composer does not imitate, he steals Igor Stravinksy Bad artists copy; good artists steal Picasso

Introduction Although its not true, all information is available online rhetoric may sound good to our ears nowadays since it has positive connotations such as, as if we are moving towards completely beyond the modernity a level at which we are now close to global consensus whereby everyone at the liberty to access any information of and kind. However, neither all the information, knowledge are online and at the same time, nor all online materials are free by all means of the word free. This brings to another question to mind: what do we mean by free? I should from the outset emphasize that the word free here might cause some conceptual misunderstandings, therefore it might be worth quoting Richard Stallman as he puts the different meanings of the word very clearly: "Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer." (Williams, p.46). So in this article as far as the open access concerned I will use the free as in both free beer and free speech. Returning to the subject of the myth of all information is available online, nevertheless, when one ends up on google books we page in order to nd and make use the of the book for whatever purpose one has, the purchase button suddenly appears on the screen immediately. And one also reads the goal of this unprecedented virtual library project:

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The Library Project's aim is simple: make it easier for people to nd relevant books specically, books they wouldn't nd any other way such as those that are out of print while carefully respecting authors' and publishers' copyrights. Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers. (Google Books, 2011)

For the rst time, e-books are outsold paperbacks in USA according to Amazon. (BBC, 2011) This might comes as quite expected to some as it seems inevitable and something essential in the era of digitization, digital archiving and media and so on. Signicant shift though this may seem, yet, this situation can be thought of as an ongoing remediation process rather than complete digitization, of things whether it be music, text or image. As Bolter and Grusin suggests in their book Remediation: understanding new media (2000), it rather seems as a recycling process whereby one reader might still have a physical book in his personal library and simultaneously she might also have an electronic version on her personal computer or even on electronic reader and so on. This situation, to some, may due to the moment of cross-over between analog and digital. As the concept of remediation argues, even if the-book-as-we-know-it is being rapidly digitized, in most circumstances however, especially as far as the online book stores concerned, the very traditional idea of the book which is the-book-as-we-know-it as physical object before the advent of the internet, still, in most cases, seems to be maintaining its boundaries even though it is digitized or indeed produced or born digital. On the other hand however, as the-book-as-we-know-it becomes more digital, easily disseminated, stored and reproduced, the more the text, content and the traditional boundaries of the book is being challenged by the digital modes of (re)production. Furthermore, It becomes more and more fragmented, dispersed and eventually more liquid with the help of personal computers, scanners, internet, networks and so on. At the same time, arguably, all the other forms of media on the other hand, are penetrating or perhaps converging into the very Erencan Gokcek #33208878 4

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idea of the-book-as-we-know-it, and so is the book also converging into other forms of media as it were, circulating around web sites, blogs, videos (particularly with the proliferation of audio-visual materials and visual story telling), tweets, text messages or even mobile phones and so on. Putting all these different modes of productions together, book, increasingly, is not capable of preserving the traditional form as we know in which you have the pages made out of dead trees whereby one starts reading the text and might come across photographs, gures, pictures, spread through out the book, and reaching the end eventually, by nishing the text and the book as it were. Now, on the other hand, the digital text as opposed to traditional text in a physically published material becomes endless thus, constantly in process of becoming. (Hall, 2008, p.212) I will revisit these ideas further on this article. However, radical change though this may seem, this digitization is most cases increasing the pace of dissemination and access as well as the prot of the capital through its nodes on networks online. Before the appearance of the printing press however, in medieval age, books were in chains in libraries which can only be accessed by privileged elites who sit on top of the brutal hierarchy within the society. Then, printing press without a doubt, amongst the other factors, paved the way for information explosion and eventually arguably the enlightenment also know as the age of reason, by changing the way in which people perceive the world they live in. Returning to date however, Gary Hall argues that we perhaps have the opportunity to go beyond the physical the-book-as-we-know-it and reconsider the idea of the book and the author with the help of digital production. Yet, this opportunity according to Gary Halls might be at stake with the increasing monopolization over the e-books by giant online book sellers such as Amazon and Google, and the disappearance of the independent book sellers. He writes in his work Digitize this book! that the fact that major book chains are increasingly reluctant to stock not only academic titles but also books, exacerbates the situation as does the fact that more and more independent bookstores are closing because of competition from Amazon.com. (Hall, 2008, p.44)

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This change from paper to digital platform has the more likely to increase the number of the electronic readers which might comes as inevitable and to some extend even presented as something good; for example environmentally friendly. Also, even though the digitization makes the prices relatively lower and renders books more accessible at a particular cost of course, it seems clear to Hall that these electronic readers in this sense, do not necessarily make the books and indeed the text what he calls liquid. In other words, it doesnt set the information, the text free, or indeed what is more important the academic papers, researches, surveys, journals, articles in particular. Books are not only being treated as commodities bought and sold, but also being constrained them in a link-on-paper form. Thus, it seems to me that, its not possible to proclaim that The-book-as-we-know is dead yet, as they only move from one platform (analog) to another (digital) by preserving the very traditional idea of the book. Simply put, in order there to be a free book, both as gratis (being free of charge) and libre (being free of restriction), it seems essential that text must move away from the boundaries of the book. Or, to think this another way, Hall would even go so far as to say that, albeit may seem utopic, perhaps books should be free of charge Erencan Gokcek #33208878 6

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in the rst place to allow us to go beyond the legitimate and autocratic restrictions which I will revisit these crucial points further on in this article. Still, even if a book is digitized and put online, there is still a beginning and an end to it. Ironically enough, though this may seems the right way to go to some, as even though digital production, dissemination and sharing is essential, and benecial, yet, books, in order to maintain the prot for the authors, publishers and editors, should travel from one platform to another with the copyrights and therefore the authority and the legitimacy attached.

The New Possibilities and Open Access The process of digital reproduction whereby making books electronic by maintaining the market value and treating them as commodities, rather than progress, arises the questions regarding the digitization as well as other possibilities of which may bring about. Such as, Gary Hall asks what if, what happened to the record industry with the advent of the peer-to-peer le sharing practices, happens to the world of electronic academic publishing? The problem that Gary Hall emphasizes however, the shift from paper to digital is merely understood as putting the paper online as it were, without touching traditional the idea of the book or in this context academic journal, along with the hidden presumption that academic texts will preserve their ink-on-paper, predigital form even Erencan Gokcek #33208878 7

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when these text are reproduced digitally [sic]. This process of what he calls papercentrism the tendency of putting the academic journals online by taking paper more or less as their model not only miss the chance of innovating something new, different ...or exceptionalbut also, maintains the academic authority within. (Hall, 2009, p.59) So much so that, it positions electronic publishing merely as a prosthetic extension of print. He, on the contrary to maintaing the paper-centric idea, citing Deleuze in his book, wants to be performative by experimenting with the new modes of digital production which he sees as an opportunity for challenging, or perhaps even transforming, not only the book per se, but the existing academic autocratic status quo, as they [digital texts] are not restricted to book or essay format. He basically wants us to imagine or play a game of science ction for a moment by asking what would it be like to have an academic equivalent of this peer-to-peer le sharing practices by going beyond the papercentrism and peer review accreditation. The new modes of digital production, according to him, however not only poses a threat to traditional academic hierarchies, legitimacy, accreditation and so on but also tells us something about the new ways of sharing academic texts not only with people from all backgrounds, but also the university itself. (Hall, 2008, pp.44-63) If this science ction game implemented which is only possible with digital production and open access, according to him, it will have some emancipatory consequences not only for the knowledge, information and the texts, but the universities on the whole: First, if peer-to-peer sharing model is established, since it will have no central place where information is stored, if not lift the copyright restrictions completely, it will create the ways around of restrictive copyright regulations that enable the publishing industry to limit the number of photocopied texts. Another alternative to conventional restricted modes of academic publishing according to him, might be self-archiving in which, academic scholars self-archive their own works on the world wide web so that everyone who has access to the internet, may benet from academia in various ways. Moreover, in this manner, academic knowledge will be decentralized. By doing so, academics will be able to be splicing and dicing from other texts, tutors could even Erencan Gokcek #33208878 8

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put their own readers together in this fashion, and ensure that they are constructed to suit the exact requirements of their specic courses. Thus, for instance, New Cultural Studies: The liquid theory reader 1 with which Gary Hall is also personally involved, in order to experiment with the new challenge to conventional academic publishing. (ibid., p.44) He alludes to this initiative in his work called Fluid notes on liquid books:

The liquid reader is freely available on the internet, on a worldwide basis to anyone, who wants to read it, including not just other researchers, but also teachers, students, investigative journalists, policy makers, union organizers, NGOs, political activists, protest groups, and the general public. It is thus hopefully playing role, however small, in breaking down some of the barriers between countries in so-called developed, developing and undeveloped worlds, and so helping to overcome the westernization of the research literature. (Hall, 2009)

The liquid theory reader (Hall & Birchall, 2009) can be found at http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/11135961/NewCultural-Studies:-The-Liquid-Theory-Reader

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He goes so far as to say that academics and researchers would no longer need to worry about whether their next project was going to appeal to a publisher as something that could be marketed and sold. Moreover, their text can remain available for as long as they wish (2008, pp.44-45) Open Access Open Access (OA) as Steven Harnad (Open Access, 2011) denes in his personal blog: free, immediate, permanent online access to the full text of research articles for anyone, web-wide. On the other hand, Hall seems to give a broader perhaps more detailed denition: By open access, I mean access that is digital, online, and free of charge to those able to connect to the Internet, without having to pay subscriptions either to publish or to [pay per] [sic] view, in its purest form, anyway. This in turn means free to upload to and download from, read, print, reproduce and distribute copies, and also free of most liensing and copyright restrictions. (p.3) Yet, as far as the book and the academic publishing concerned, the way in which both Hall and Harnad use the word free is as in both free of charge and liberty (New Oxford American Dictionary). At the same time, admitting the complex, multiplicitous and uncertain issues OA may brings about, Gary Hall foregrounds these problematic issues as for the ideas of the book, academic authorship, the proper name, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer-review, copyright, intellectual property, and content creation, he strikingly calls OA as legal piracy even though it has negative connotations. (Hall, Pirate Philosophy, 2011).

Copyright and Free Circulation of the Text Is there an achievable level where copyright restrictions no more interrupts the free circulation of text? Utopia though this may seem to some, however, it is on the contrary, it might be what Michel Foucault calls Heterotopia, a space where there isnt any hegemonic interference of any kind whatsoever. (Foucault, 1967). This heterotopian level seems only possible to Hall with the new approach to text and the book. What is more, although, this whole idea may raise concerns around copyright issues, and Hall nds Harnads approach to open access somehow problematic at some Erencan Gokcek #33208878 10

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point, Harnad/ Oppenheim preprint and corrigenda strategy to Hall, provides ways around this issue by allowing authors to self-archive or establish green road to open access. (Harnad, 2001-2003 cited by Hall, 2008, p.45) This strategy follows particular steps:

1. Self-archive the pre-refereeing preprint 2. Submit the preprint for refereeing (revise etc.) 3. At acceptance, try to x the copyright transfer agreement to allow self-archiving 4. If [step 3] is successful, self-archive the refereed post-print 5. If [step 4] is unsuccessful, archive the"corrigenda" (Harnad, 2001)

Harnard continues: 'Simply do a revised 2nd edition! Update the references, rearrange the text (and add more text and data if you wish). For the record, the enhanced draft can be accompanied by a "de-corrigenda" le, stating which of the enhancements were not in the published version' (Harnad, 2001 cited in Hall, 2003) But, it is not my intention to provide a broad account of the of copyright issues in general. Moving on however, this kind of open access here, will also eventually and inevitably change the way in which the worth of academic text is measured by lifting the market-driven evaluations and labels such as for-prot, not-just-for-prot or not-necessarily-for-prot (2008, p.57) Yet, Gary Hall seems to be unsatised with this approach as he believes it maintains the mainstream paper-centric mode of academic production as it inherits the formers means of authority and legitimacy by maintaining the peer-view mechanism thus the rigorous system of quality control (p.58)

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A Question Concerning University and Academic Text Hardt and Negris account for the current status is as follows: as the communication increasingly become the fabric of production, and if linguistic cooperation has increasingly become the structure of productive corporeality, then the control over linguistic sense and meaning and the networks of communication becomes an ever more central issue for political struggle (Hardt and Negri 2000, 404 Cited in Hall, 2003 p.5) Gary Hall, similarly thinks that information and communication have become a principal terrain through which power relations are established today (Hall, 2008) Clearly, for him, along with Hardt and Negri, today its the university that is the main source of the knowledge, reproduction of labour force and social and cultural stratications. As once was the factory, so now is the university (Edu-factory collective, 2007 Cited in Hall, p.5) So the problem and at the same time the solution itself resides at the heart of the university as it produces the knowledge , theory as well as practice, it spreads within the society and ideally contributes to the civil, genuine democracy in the end. The question is: How is the knowledge now, distributed from and within Universities and eventually how should ordinary general public access to this knowledge to make the change their lives in a better manner as it happened not long after the invention of the printing press which contributed to the information explosion, renaissance and Erencan Gokcek #33208878 12

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reform in the aftermath of it. So, university is critical point where knowledge is reproduced. However, Gary Hall doesnt seem to be content with not only the current neo-liberal turn in capitalist societies but also the ways in which academic publishing and the communication has taken place to the date. Libraries, for him, are increasingly unable to effort free market-driven works, researches and studies which are forced by the capitalist for-prot corporations. There are also clear reasons concerning the academia and academics why he is openly supporting Open Access as opposed to the private, for-prot academic publishing, he draws attention to important point in his book titled Digitize This Book!:

[A] great many academic titles are merely repeating and repackaging old ideas and material. All of which means it is getting harder and harder for junior members of the profession to publish the kind of research-led books and monographs that often enable them to secure their rst full-time position, let alone establish a reputation for originality of thought. (2008: 6)

He also believes, this mode of publishing is not student friendly as it is not accessible at the same time being at the mercy of the publishers nal decision whether a particular book is worth publishing or not. Moreover, if they decide not to, an unpublished book will not likely to appear on full-text what they call global virtual library projects such as Google books project, as it has to be physically published in order to be able to be digitized and nally accessible online. Which, to me, this situation perfectly and repeatedly justies the concept of remediation. Therefore, nothing signicantly changes here neither from access nor the book-as-we-know-it point of view, since these projects still depend on the psychical books, conventional modes of publishing and indeed, communicating. On the whole, this way of sharing academic knowledge supposedly with public is clearly restrained by the commodity culture and property relations of late capitalist society.

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A good approximation to this very issue according to Hall, is Open Access or even OA + which, for him, it is the possibility of making all the research literature open access and thus available at very low cost to researchers, teachers, students, and the public, on a global scale (Hall, 2008, p.8)

Thus, knowledge and research can be set if not entirely, free as in free of charge, and free as in free from restrictions so that academic texts can easily circulate and be accessible for those have access to the internet. What is more, open access may consist not only of journals but also books, databases and the computing technology that is required to develop and support them, available to those who cannot afford to invest in such resources themselves. (ibid., p.8). By making all knowledge easily accessible, this may pave the way to what John Willinsky calls access principle to take place which encourages commitment to the value and quality of research and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might prot by it (2006, p.5 cited by Hall) Gary Hall emphasizes that this is the true, fair and free exchange of knowledge and information on worldscale.

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Academic Authority and Papercentrism Although current shift from paper to digital may seem bring a situation where publishing environment free from any form of authority, yet, academic authority on the other hand, gears up for the competition by positioning itself as the prosthetic extension of print as I mentioned. Hall is openly against papercentrism, authority, legitimacy, editors, referees, accreditations and sovereignty of any kind whatsoever. He is not interested in reproducing the academic works on papers again. He wants go beyond the paper, discover the unknown territories by taking advantage of the digital reproduction. He doesnt take peer review for granted. Having said that, he is not purposing bringing it [aporia of authority] crashing down the legitimacy of the academic publishing. Its rater for him, borrowing Derridas concept, deconstruction of the xed and solid structures for instance institutions, thus, the book. Halls embraces and celebrates the emergence of the digital reproduction, wiki communications, as they have the potential to transform the xity of the rules, conventions, and stabilizations of power. Citing Derridas Deconstruction, he explains that even if these new rivals to the conventional perception of the book and the academic publishing on the whole which may seem to be unstable [sic] and chaotic from deconstruction point of view Erencan Gokcek #33208878 15

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however, these challenges might be threat and a promise at the same time. A promise and eventually a change to destabilize in Derridas terms; ...if there were continual stability, there would be no need for politics... (Derrida, 1996a, p.84 cited in Hall, 2008, p. 76)

Lastly, Katherine Hayles inuential account of digital text on her work Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature is signicantly important. She argues that new digital production can no longer be understood from the paper-centric point of view. For her there are some other things that is designed and coming into question concerning the idea of what is the work of book, vocabulary and the language. This required critique will understand that interplays between words and images are essential to the work's meaning; it will further realize that navigation, animation and other digital effects are not neutral devices but designed practices that enter deeply into the work's structures (Hayles, 2003)

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From Text to Hypertext: From Author to Death of the Author So far we have discussed what might happen to the book with the arrival of the free Open access. However, there is also fundamental transformation regarding the narrative of all kinds of texts whether be in books or online. This change challenges us to re-think about the book-as-we-know-it as it moves from text to hypertext through digital (re)production. This process of course has historical roots. The book as a physical object according to New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD) a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers emphasizes the completion from one point to another, from very rst page to very last, left to right and so on. Its linear and teleological. This the perception of the book, the history through it, is being now challenged by the movement from text to hypertext. if hypertext, is the underlying concept dening the structure of the World Wide Web, making it an easy-to-use and exible format to share information over the Internet (Wikipedia,2011) Then, is indeed the vital element for paving the for liquidity of the text on world wide web. Thus Katherine Hayles wirtes: The conjunction between spell and code foregrounds the fact that electronic literature has a very different materiality than a print book. Strictly speaking, an electronic text is a process rather than an artifact one can hold in one's hand. It cannot be accurately said to reside in a CD-ROM, a diskette, or even on a server; what exists at such locations are simply data and commands. (2003)

However, unprecedented though this may seem, Adrian Johns interestingly writes in his book The Nature of the Book that before and even after the presence of printing press however, there had not been solid, stabled and xed objects. He writes:

Textual corruption of even such closely monitored text as The Bible actually increased with the advent of print, due to various combinations piracy and careless printing. The rst book

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reputed to have been printed without any errors appeared only in 1760. Before then, variety was the rule, even within single editions. (Johns, 1998, p.31)

So, we can perhaps assume then, printing press, to a degree, stopped the text being liquid by restraining or indeed stabilizing even though it took some time to do so (until 1760). Referring to this important point in his book Halls writes:

The development and spread of the concept of the author, along with mass printing techniques, uniform multiple-copy editions, copyright, established publishing houses, editors, and so forth meant that many of these ideas subsequently began to appear xed. Consequently, readers were no longer asked to make decisions over questions of authority and legitimacy. (Hall, 2008, p.161)

Indeed, now its our chance to take responsibility over the text be it collective intelligence, the power of the crowd Folksonomy as one might call it, or Social Scholarship. Such changes with the help of digital medium, pave the way for the open editing of the content of any other medium for example, web portals, new papers, magazines, tagging the museum materials or indeed even friends on social networking web sites and so on. In order to understand the power of crowd, comparing big, sensational events should give us the idea of how the amount of data today is produced. If we imagine the big events such as The moon landing had happened just now as if for the rst time, how it consequences in terms of digital (re)mediation in social media landscape would have been like? Of course these tools give us the chance for reection on such events thus the public perception as opposed to written books, articles, given interviews etc., by few. Yet, for Hall, this merely transfers that authority to a different location(Hall, 2009) Furthermore, he continues to say that these new validation of authority and dispersed, distributed and decentralized way of editing the content of and medium online, not only interrogates the authority of the author but the that of the work itself. Linking this outcome to Michel Foucaults question what is an Erencan Gokcek #33208878 18

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author or indeed Roland Barthes inuential essay The death of the Author, its time we re-think about the problematic and complex issues around the authorship and its legitimacy particularly in this era with the proliferation of the text or hypertext what is called ad innitum he suggests. Kevin Kelly (2006) puts it in a similar way in his article named Scan This Book! on The New York Times:

..But the technology that will bring us a planetary source of all written material will also, in the same gesture, transform the nature of what we now call the book and the libraries that hold them

Logical though this may seem, he goes on to embrace a rather technologically deterministic expectation:
When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50 petabyte hard disks. Today you need a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. With tomorrow's technology, it will all t onto your iPod. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet if it doesn't plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what's taking so long. (Could we get it up and running by next week? They have a history project due.)

This last example may be seen as the conventional wisdom of or may be the underestimation of what digital networks are capable of doing. On the other hand however, Martin Poser sees these networks in a different way:

A different sort of public space from that of modernity is emerging, a heterotopia in Foucaults term, and peer-to-peer networks constitute an important ingredient in that development, one worthy of safeguarding and promoting for that reason alone. If copyright

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laws need to be changed and media corporations need to disappear or transform themselves, this result must be evaluated in relation to a new regime of culture that is now possible. (Poster 2005, n.p.; 2006, 204 Cited by Hall, 2008, p.153)

May be this emergence can be better understood through the incident took place recently in Turkey. The Army of the Imam On 6th of March, 2011 Ahmet Isik who is the author of an unpublished manuscript called The Imams Army, were subject of police raids on the ground of the allegations that the book was performative even though Turkish Police denied by citing that arrest wasnt related to the book. In his article Guillaume Perrier on The Guardian writes that the Army of the Imam was expected to throw light on the murky links between the police and the religious brotherhood led by the Turkish imam Fethullah Glen, who has been living in exile in the US since 1999. His followers control whole swaths of the nation's economy, operate schools all over the world, and have interests in banking, healthcare, humanitarian action and the media. The elitist, secretive Islamic organisation has patiently inltrated state apparatus over the past 20 years. (Perrier, 2011) However, the police carried out raids both at the printing house and among people who had digital copies of the manuscript. The copies were deleted and the people were involved warned that they might be accused of aiding an illegal organization. Apart from an autocratic and a hegemonic repression of Turkish police and therefore the sate, what makes this case even more interesting is the fact that Turkish Police was actually trying to what seems to be an impossible mission to carry out in the digital era by perhaps rst time in history, trying to censor an unpublished book. Thus, unsurprisingly, the alleged book was immediately released on Googles online document-sharing service and quickly spread through social media platforms. What is more, ironically enough, despite the fact that the book initially had no name before the arrest took place, the book was subsequently named as Those who touch [it] burn by the he crowd. Although there were various versions of the alleged book and this caused some confusion initially to some degree, however, it didnt take much Erencan Gokcek #33208878 20

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time to determine the correct version with help of the conrmation came from the author himself. Currently, the Imaminordusu.com website published Sik's book and everyone who has access to the internet can easily read it even without downloading or indeed in this respect, touching it. So, then one might ask, who does now involving an illegal activity? More interestingly, how does the police will arrest perhaps millions of people who touched this book? (if it is still the accurate in this specic case) From this angle, may be we can see the justication such different, unprecedented peer-to-peer networks can be capable of challenging even the state itself.

Final Comments

In this article I endeavored to investigate the question whether we are experiencing the end of the-book-as-we-know-it along with the emergence of new modes of the digital productions and its effects on current states of affairs within the academic publishing and inevitably open access. First, even though current intense process of digitization is presented as progress, I argued in line with the concept of remediation Erencan Gokcek #33208878 21

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that, as seen in the example of Google book project, these are mostly a change from one platform to another, as they move from print or paper to digital, thus, there is no ground to claim these practices should be seen as progress as they still constitute restrictions such as copyrights and still are still seen as commodities that are bought and sold. However, looking to this issue from Gary Halls point of view as second layer of the argument, this interplay between paper and digital, doesnt necessarily help us to tackle with the existing forms of authority and legitimacy within the universities, institutions, academics and as an intellectual output of these organizations, the book itself. Yet, by maintaing the paper-centric presumptions, Hall argues we are at the stake of missing the very fresh and emancipatory opportunity that digital production brings. Simply for him as I showed in the article that these new modes of production cannot be seen as prosthetic extension of paper-centric publishing. This according to Hall, can be a historical mistake if we are fail to move beyond the paper, and the traditional hegemony attached to it. Moving on to the third layer of the argument that, Hall suggest that peer-to-peer networks have highest possibility to challenge this very problematic obstacle along with self-archiving as opposed to a totalitarian, centralized virtual open access as the former is decentralized and therefore there is perhaps less mechanisms of authority and legitimacy. By implementing the true both gratis and libre open access we will not only have the chance of the changing the landscape within university which is increasingly dominated with neo-liberal concepts but also the book and the perception of the world with the more inclusive points of views as opposed to western dominated studies as far as the cultural studies concerned. That said, Hall calls for the performativity in the terms of Derridas deconstruction in order to perform the necessary action by implementing the open access free from any Erencan Gokcek #33208878 22

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restirctions of any kind whatsoever, so that we can transform the book we desire, the university we desire and perhaps the better ethics and politics we long desire and again for free both as in free beer and free speech I also visited Katherine Hayles ideas on hypertextuality in line with the Halls concept on liquidity as the-book-as-we-know-it becomes more and more fragmented and dispersed as bit and pieces on digital landscape, she says that these new challenges requires new philosophy. Clearly agrees with Hall, she goes on the say that papercentrism can no longer be justified with the advent of digital text. Furthermore in addition to text, she writes that also electronic literature matures, it develops rhetorics, grammars, and syntaxes unique to digital environments. She concludes by saying that 'read' [sic] is no longer an adequate term and The future of electronic literature is our future. (Hayles, 2003) Perhaps, today, publishing is no longer an adequate term, as not only publishing but also its traditional restrictions such as copyright, authorship are obsolete concepts.

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And finally I tried to look into a recent case in Turkey in which an unpublished book was pre-mediated through the digital modes of sharing. This I think justifies the critical issues surrounding us today, as Hall emphasizes in the end of his work in his book: A fixed, pure and incorruptible institution could only be a violent, transcendental, totalizing, and totalitarian fantasy. Albeit, there might not be end of the book as such as it will be in the constant process of becoming perhaps, just like evrything else.

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Bibliography

Adrian Johns, 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. 1 Edition. University Of Chicago Press. BBC News, 2011. Amazon Kindle e-book downloads outsell paperbacks.[ONLINE] Available at: http:// www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12305015. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Google Books, 2011. Library Project, 2011. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/ library.html. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Foucault, Michel, 1967. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. 2011. [ONLINE] Available at:http:// foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Gary Hall, 2008. Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Electronic Mediations). Edition. Univ Of Minnesota Press. Hayles. 2011. Deeper into the Machine: The Future of Electronic Literature. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/245/241. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Harnad, 2011. For Whom the Gate Tolls? [ONLINE] Available at:http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12893/1/ resolution.html#Harnad/Oppenheim. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Jay David Bolter, 2000. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 1st Edition. The MIT Press Open Access. 2011. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Perrier, Guillaume, 2011. Turkish authorities launch raids to censor book before publication | World news | Guardian Weekly . 2011. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/05/ turkey-censorship-ahmet-sik-perrier. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Pirate Philosophy, 2011. Pirate Philosophy- steal this!. [ONLINE] Available at: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=1YkXDTQ7iFs. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Putting Knowledge to Work and Letting Information Play: The Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC). 2011[ONLINE] Available at: http:// www.cddc.vt.edu/10th-book/putting_knowledge_to_work.pdf. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 2011. Hypertext - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. [ONLINE] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext. [Accessed 04 May 2011]. Williams Sam, 2002. Free as in Freedom - Richard Stallmans Crusade for Free Software [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/

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free_as_in_freedom.richard_stallman_crusade_for_free_software.sam_williams/portrait.pdf. [Accessed 04 May 2011].

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