3b. Symbolic aspects of the book
The concepts of e-book and electronic text can be defined in many ways. Most traditional definitions are based on the functional and material characteristics of e-book technology. From this perspective, e-books are defined by the following characteristics:
- they are electronically searchable;
- they are dynamic in terms of content updateability;
- they are adaptable in terms of cross-platform portability;
- they are physically portable;
- they are user-interactive; and
- they are non-sequential – assuming that their reading process uses hypertext technology.
E-books are currently available in various formats, such as HTML, CHM, PDF, djVU, LIT, and others; most e-book formats allow for multilinear navigation. So, hypertextuality seems to be a characteristic feature of e-book technologies. However, most of the work on hypertext has considered it from a technological perspective: most of the time hypertext is explained in terms of nodes, links, markup language, and so on. Hypertextuality has a substantial impact on the symbolic aspects of the way we read texts, but very few research initiatives have tried to formalize this, especially from a semantic point of view.
Hypertextuality may be an important feature of e-book technologies, but hypertexts themselves are heterogeneous, and can be defined from many perspectives. For instance, the concept of hypertext can be defined as a hardware- or software-based computer technology, or as an abstract textual structure. For example, in the lexical database Wordnet, hypertext is defined as machine-readable text that is not sequential but is organized so that related items of information are connected. Although incomplete, this definition is a very good example of hypertext as an abstract textual structure.
Formal hypertext models can offer tools for an understanding of hypertextuality's main characteristics, but they can also neglect the importance of the user (the reader in the context of e-book technology), particularly when the objective is to understand and model the meaning of hypertext. The challenge is to model or formalize both e-books and hypertextuality, as the latter is one of the former's main characteristics, at the same time taking the reader into consideration as an interpretative agent.
Top