New horizons for the book in the 21st century

This week our class has read Florian Cramer’s essay “Post-Digital Writing,” Alessandro Ludovico’s conclusion titled “Post-Digital Print: a Future Scenario” in Post-Digital Print, Peter Suber’s chapter “What is Open Access” as well as explored Giselle Bieguelman’s electronic work O Livro depois do Livro in order to learn about post-digitalist theories and open access politics. In his essay, Cramer discusses how literary writing in the age of the Internet has shifted 19th century notions of publishing and authorship and the simultaneous transformation of the codex into a valued vintage product in the 21st century. Ludovico affirms this in stating that current traditional print publishing is “presenting its products as valuable objects and collector’s items, by exploiting the physical and tactile qualities of the paper” (154). Ludovico also hypothesizes that in the future, hybrid forms of writing that combine print and digital qualities have yet to arise. As our class has seen earlier in the semester, such works are indeed emerging as evidenced through Borsuk and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen, a print book that employs printed QR codes in order to display text on a screen. Both Cramer and Ludovico, similar to McLuhan’s analysis of the ideological value of the medium, delve into the consequences and transformations that digital technologies have had on writing in our day and age. One of the most recent modes of distributing writing online is seen through the emergence of Open Access. In his work, Suber defines Open Access as literature which is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” and proceeds to advocate for it given that it allows authors to reach a wider audience since their work is available for free, among other reasons such as creating an impact in a particular field and building one’s academic reputation.

According to Suber’s definition of Open Access, Beiguelman’s book The Book after the Book qualifies as a work of open access given that it is available for free to those able to connect to the world wide web. In this work, one of the opening pages presents a myriad of symbols and letters saturating the webpage in varying colors and sizes, and some lines are superimposed making it impossible to decipher any meaning. This surplus of information creates an effect of confusion that possibly comments on the infinite amount of information found in digital spaces. If one looks closely, however, one of the repeated lines on the page reads “We begin to redefine our boundaries at the intersection of words and symbols.” By writing this message mainly in symbols found on the computer keyboard as opposed to alphabetic letters, this work claims that a message or a narrative can be still be transmitted effectively (meaning that the reader can read it and understand it) in new and different media. The title of the work itself expands the concept of a book from being solely a traditional print book to books that are born and only exist in electronic spaces. As stated previously, not only is The Book after the Book available to read to many, but it is also possible to contribute to the content of the work as demonstrated in the section “books of sand” where readers/participants get to create their own stories. This possibility also redefines the notion of a static book with one or a few authors into one that can change perpetually through its multiple authors and continual content additions. In this way, thanks to electronic books, the contemporary notion of book becomes malleable, accessible, shareable and encouraging of writing and creativity for all involved. Consequently, it can be stated that electronic texts have the ability to greatly benefit producers and recipients of works in various ways precisely by pushing the boundaries of what has been traditionally considered as authorship and originality. Furthermore, with the help of Open Access (though not completely without its caveats), the process of writing, creativity and distributing of knowledge is greatly facilitated and enhanced.