3a. Material aspects of the book
Understanding the material aspects of the book is a crucial pre-condition to developing e-books. The very name "e-book" alerts us to this fact. When the movable-type press created the opportunity for mass producing texts, its operators worked hard to make books look like manuscripts. It took many decades for books to move beyond being mechanically produced manuscripts. E-books could suffer from a similar (if likely shorter) developmental lag unless we attend closely to the processes and products that have, over the 500 years of print culture, made books what they are. Revising the printed book into electronic format while keeping to the conventions of print is not the best use of our resources. Our culture will be better served by imagining a more radical departure from the printed volume. To help ourselves make this leap, we might juxtapose the set of practices carried out in producing printed texts and the set of similarly-aimed practices necessary for the production of electronic texts.
To discuss the material aspects of the book, then, is to discuss not only paper, ink, formatting, binding and content, but also the processes that must be brought to bear in order to produce a book. Before the paper can be folded to create a folio, quarto, or octavo, it must first be manufactured as a broadsheet or as a roll. Before early modern paper could be manufactured, a slurry had to be prepared from pulped linen, lime, and water. Today, wood fibre or recycled material must be pulped through a process that is partially mechanical and partially chemical. In the early days, paper, vellum or papyrus was used to enable the circulation of a written text, each with its own production processes. Before these media, there was wax; before wax, stone dash and it should be noted that this skeletal history is decidedly Western in its slant.
Changing means of production fundamentally alter cultural notions of authorship, readership, and literary form. For example, the substantial cost of the materials required to produce the early printed book necessitated selective publication according to any number of criteria (content quality, author's status, marketability, and so on). The cost of the end product also determined the readership of printing materials: as technological developments reduced production costs, readership expanded and changed, as did the kinds of books that were produced. With the advent of machine-made paper, for example, periodical and newspaper publication proliferated in the nineteenth century (Rose, 1995). Another consequence of reduced printing costs was the emergence of the so-called popular press. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, smaller and cheaper books, chapbooks, pamphlets and broadsheets brought a new demographic to the book market. This in turn enabled new means of influence upon the reading public in sociopolitical matters such as religion, and new forms of writing to meet the interests of an increasingly diverse reading public (Chartier, 1994; Spufford, 1982; Watt, 1991). Conversely, electronic publishing began with a cost advantage over print production. Many forms of e-books are already comparatively cheap to produce, and they do not require a large infrastructure of dedicated printers, editors, and publishers. Consequently, what used to be known on the internet (with a certain amount of stigma) as self-publishing is now the norm. Selective publication is no longer necessitated by technology or economics. This new means of production forces a reassessment of cultural assumptions about authorship, readership, genre, accessibility, and usability (including quality control and censorship).
Top