The
printed word caters to two distinct needs: that for
information and that of
pleasure. The
book has fulfilled these needs admirably for the last
millennium or so. Now that technology has made the
electronic book possible, one is left wondering whether human ambition should be to
digitise everything that has ever existed in print. Quite apart from the unfeasible nature of this scheme, the realisation that it is unnecessary will hopefully help set priorities for
electronic publishing.
The advantages of electronic publishing mainly cited are its accessibility, more reasonable pricing and that it can present text as hypertext. The first two advantages are not yet evident, as it is still cheaper to buy books than to purchase an e-reader (a special handheld device for reading e-texts) and that the texts that one desires may not be available in electronic format. Contingent to these developments of course, is the booklover’s eternal and justified complaint: the material form of the book that enhances much of the experience of reading, is lost forever. The potential of hypertext however remains unexploited in a market where publishers are resorting, rather randomly, to pre-existing popular texts or texts, though written for the medium, could just as well be published as a printed book and there would be no evident difference. An example of this was the online publishing of Stephen King’s e-book The Plant – an experiment based on the ideal and rather naïve assumption that this would lend a democratic aspect to the book – it could be read anywhere and for a pittance. But the failure of this experiment lay in the shortcomings of the screen as medium.
Hypertext then remains the trump card of the academic e-publishing industry. Educational institutions all over the world are benefiting from its applications: built-in dictionaries, search, bookmarking, highlighting, annotating capabilities and multimedia enhancements. McGraw–Hill’s Encyclopedia of Science & Technology is but one example of how non-fiction publishing can revolutionise the e-publishing market. Along with all the original print matter – over 7,000 articles – the online version incorporates 60,000 article-to-article hot links, 1,500 Internet links, as well as an electronic "suggestion box" for users, be they librarians or individual customers.
There is absolutely no doubt that hypertext has impacted literary studies in profound ways – increasing scholarly communication, accessibility to both canonised and unfamiliar texts, and as a natural progression wreaking havoc with the very concept of the canon itself. The technology spoken of earlier is capable of encapsulating hundreds, or even thousands of books, to be stored in a single volume. But literature itself, in its original avatar which gives pleasure and is appreciated for its own sake, is being bullied into being a digital presence. Sufficient attention is not being paid to the opportunities that the medium offers to today’s author. Instead of digitising existing backlists, publishers should exploit hypertext as a new way of seeing/reading. A radical hypertext equivalent of Joyce’s Ulysses or even Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with the support of a major publisher is yet to find its way onto screens everywhere. The anxiety regarding the death of the printed word is baseless, as the e-book tends to fall, more or less into the category of an imprint, and is still far from creating a new literacy.
This writeup was triggered by an article in The Economist, dated December 9th, 2000, 'Digital Ink meets Electronic Paper.'