- Book as material: “Many of the chapters of this digital book comment upon their own material conditions: the ways they are arranged; the interplay they exploit among text, sound, and image; the kinds of actions, interpretive and responsive, they expect of their audience…Early digital books, like this one, are similarly self-reflexive (Hayles, 2002). Because they are in the process of being invented, their authors are often hyper-aware of their status as objects whose conventions are yet to be defined. Thus, as we thought about this book, we considered how the book’s materiality could or could not be translated to digital formats.”
- Book as technology: “Books, that is, are not only the products of technological changes such as the development of the printing press or the codex; they are themselves a technology—a way of organizing and instantiating certain kinds of information, values, and ideologies. As technologies, they exist within complex frameworks of communicative practices including not only the object of the book itself, but also its authors, publishers, printers, shippers, sellers, and readers.”
- Book as genre: “We know how to use the technology of the book because we have learned how to respond to the genre conventions it employs. That is, books are recognizable as books because they share not only formal conventions but also substantive agreements about what books are, what they do, and what kinds of interactions they foster. Different kinds of books, of course, instantiate different sets of generic agreements.”
Part of the purpose of this edited collection is to discover how “print books work transferable (or not) to digital books.” So, the editors think of the book in three ways: the book as a material object, the book as a technology, and the book as a genre.
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