The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space
By Johanna Drucker © 2003
A lecture presented to the Syracuse University History of the Book Seminar, April 25, 2003.
Abstract: What do designers of electronic books have to learn from the traditional, paper-based codex? Drawing on scholarship in the history of the book, this talk argues that the idea of a book should be as much grounded in what it does as what it looks like. Using examples from the development of marginalia, tables of contents, and other paratextual features to analyze the way books work, and creative innovations wrought by book artists, this talk suggests that many principles useful for the design of electronic information spaces– and the “virtual” book– can be extracted from traditional codex works.
The brief career of the “e-book” has been plagued with fits and starts. In the twenty years since desk-top computers have come into widespread use, a whole host of surrogates for traditional books have been trotted out with great fanfare and high expectations. In almost every case, these novelties are accompanied by comparisons between familiar forms and their reinvented shape in an electronic context. That legacy can be traced in nearly every descriptive title:: the expanded book, the super-book, the hyper-book, or, my personal favorite for its touching, underdog, sensibility – the “book emulator”. Such nomenclature seems charged by a need to acknowledge the historical priority of books and to invoke a link between their established cultural identity and these electronic surrogates.
Nonetheless, the rhetoric that accompanies these hybrids tends to suggest that all of the advantages are on the electronic side. The copy written in support of what are frequently new products bidding for market share contains conspicuous promises of improvement. The idea that electronic “books” will “supercede the limitations” of paper-based books and overcome the “drawbacks” of traditional books features largely in such promotional claims. But why? On what grounds? In this rhetoric, books are supposedly static, fixed, finite forms that can be vastly improved through the addition of so-called “interactive” features. Testing those claims against the design of various means of text access and display in electronic formats one encounters a field fraught with contradictions. Electronic presentations often mimic the most kitsch elements of book iconography while the newer features of electronic functionality seem not to have found their place in the interface at all. So we see simulacral page drape but very little that indicates the capacity for such specifically electronic abilities as rapid refresh and time-stamped updates. Might the design of e-books (the term I’ll rely on for lack of a better moniker) be aided by a different approach?
A glance at the literature on electronic books shows the persistence of these hyperbolic claims over more than a decade. Voyager, the adventurous and frankly visionary early pioneer in the design of on-line formats for hypertext and other new media presentations of experimental works launched its “Expanded Book” in the early 1990s, before the Web was in operation, using CDs and other storage devices. But Voyager abandoned this development, out of money and out of spirit for the task. Audiences have not materialized, and the alternative reading practices of hypertext story structures have not found large followings. The one area where branching narratives and experimental pathways have taken off dramatically is in the design of games, a field that rarely feels compelled to reference books as a point of historical or conceptual origin. The experiment to develop new reading formats would appear to have reached an impasse.
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