The Unbound Book

Joost Kircz, Adriaan Weel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040783801
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What might the digital revolution we're currently living through mean for conventional paper books? Is there a future for the long-form text at all? At the onset of the digital deluge, books had evolved into the perfect reading machine. In the screen era, technology increasingly and emphatically foregrounds itself in the digital reading experience. It is one thing to identify what we lose in the process (which is a natural human tendency), but quite another and, it might be argued, an ultimately more fruitful one, to identify how that screen technology might shape the activities for which we always used to use paper. Screen technology is likely to determine our learning and entertainment habits. Indeed, the 'industrial' forms of reading that may be performed by the computer have a very tenuous relationship to what we have always understood by the term. Awareness of the issues, and eventually new insights, are essential if we want screen technology to offer a digital future to the long-form text.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• The book unbinding
• ‘I read the titles on the spines and remember’: The unbound reader of the future
• What a book was and what remains: Thoughts about the future of trade publishing
• Social reading is no longer an oxymoron
• 81,498 words: The book as data object
• Bound to be a book: Towards print as multimedia and e-books as paperbacks
• Digital readers’ responsibilities
• The digitisation of narrative reading: Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence
• E-reading essentials in a time of change and unfixity
• Electronic environments for reading: A select annotated bibliography of pertinent hardware and software (2011)
• Writing differently in the digital era: Hamlet in Hyperborg
• About the authors
• References