Back
to the Future?
"Tell
me, O Muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many
ways . . ." Are we about to hear of a cybernaut surfing
the Net? Actually, as the dwindling band of the classically
educated will recognize, this is a popular translation of the
opening line of the Odyssey.
But it's
also an excellent starting point for thinking about the character
and uses of text in an online world since, in the days of Homer,
words had no material embodiment; they floated freely in the
air, and faded away as the itinerant poet ceased to speak. In
the thousands of years since, humankind has figured out innumerable
ways to bind words permanently to matter ‚ to carve them into
clay and stone, to print them on paper, to form them out of
unlikely things like neon tubes, and furtively to spray them
onto walls. Now, in some ways, we're back where we started.
If I want to consult the text of the Odyssey, I no longer bother
to seek out the tattered volume that's somewhere on my shelves;
I just call up Net Search, type in some keywords and click a
couple of times, and the bits that I want come flowing down
the line to my laptop cmputer. The ancient text has finally
been freed from its long enslavement to materiality; it inscribes
itself briefly on my screen, then disappears when I click to
dismiss it.
Don't get
me wrong. I still love the feel of that old clothbound volume
in my hands. I cherish the memories it evokes. I do feel a little
guilty about leaving it to gather dust. But the attractions
of the newcomer are just too seductive to ignore. Without having
to carry a weighty package of paper around with me, I can get
to the digital version at any time, from anywhere in the world.
It doesn't cost me anything. It's never unavailable because
it's been borrowed by someone else. I need not fear losing it
by accidentally leaving it somewhere. Since it doesn't have
a limited number of physical copies, it cannot go out of print.
I can instantly copy quotations (without worrying about transcription
errors), and paste them into texts ‚ like this
very one
‚ that I am constructing myself. I can click on hot-linked words
to discover where they show up in other ancient Greek texts.
And (if I were scholar enough to find these capabilities useful)
I could go back to the original Greek at any point and click
on words to find dictionary entries, run morphological analyses,
and even analyze frequencies of occurrence in different contexts.
Finally, I can even make a hard copy whenever I need that for
some reason. The digital text has new pleasures.Does this make
the printed text obsolete? Will printers, binders, bookshops
and libraries soon be things of the past? I don't think so.
But the online digital text does take over some of the traditional
functions of ink on paper, and it does enable some strikingly
new ways of producing, transforming, and using literary material.
Its emergence requires writers to reconsider their craft, it
forces designers to rethink the task of making language visible,
and it leaves publishers anxiously scrambling to find new business
models.
The
Case of City of Bits
In 1995
I had a chance to explore these questions in a practical context
when, with the MIT Press, I published my book City of Bits.
Since it dealt with the digital revolution and the new relationships
that were being created between the material and virtual worlds,
we decided that it should be self-exemplifying-that it should
appear simultaneously as a hardback and in a full-text World
Wide Web version. As far as I know, it was the first book to
be published simultaneously in print and on the Web. (At the
very least, it could not have had many predecessors.)
We made
the marketing people happy by providing a link to an online
order form from the opening screen of the Web site; enter your
name and address, include your credit card number (in a secure
transaction), click to transmit your order, and a copy gets
sent to you immediately. Conversely, we published the URL (the
address in cyberspace) of the Web version on the dustjacket
of the print version. So a reader of either one could always
conveniently obtain the other.
We provided
free access to the Web version. (As the Web develops, convenient
mechanisms for charging for access to online material are being
put in place, and these will obviously be crucial to the development
of an online publishing industry. But these were not highly
developed when we put City of Bits online, and attempting
to charge just didn't seem worth the trouble at that point.
There was some risk in this, of course; why would anyone buy
a copy when the online version was right there at no cost? Perhaps
we would lose sales. But we guessed that the additional sales
generated by the Web site would outweigh such losses, and there
is some good evidence that we were right; in the first two printings,
about 2% of the total sales were directly through the online
order form, and it is likely that the Web site also stimulated
bookstore and mail-order sales.Why should this be so? The answer
is that the hardback and online versions added value to the
text in different and complementary fashions. (The dimensions
of that complementarity will be explored in the discussion that
follows.) So readers of the Web version are not necessarily
potential customers for the hardback. And lots of people decided
that they wanted both, to use in different ways.
Hardback,
Paperback, and No-back
Of course,
publishing a book in different versions is not a new idea; it
has long been a common strategy to put out both hardbacks and
paperbacks. The hardback is more expensive and more robust,
and it is aimed at libraries and at buyers who want to keep
it permanently on their bookshelves, while the paperback is
cheaper is not designed to have such a long life. Depending
on the content and the marketing strategy for a particular book,
it may appear in hardback only, in paperback only, in paperback
with a small number of hardbacks for sale to libraries, or in
hardback followed by a less expensive paperback at a later point.
With the
Web, the online no-back emerges as a third option at the inexpensive
and ephemeral end of the spectrum. It can be used, even by very
small publishers, to achieve instant world-wide distribution;
certainly we found, with City of Bits, that it was quite
widely read and even reviewed in some countries long before
copies of the hardback were available there. But, since publishers
generally have not begun to guarantee the permanent existence
of Web sites, you still need a hardback copy if you want to
be sure of continued access in the future.
You may
also want a well designed, well produced print version for ease
of extended reading, portability, and just the sheer pleasure
of it. By comparison with even the very best laptop computer,
a well-made book is light, tough (you can drop a book without
damaging it, but not a laptop), comfortable in the hand, and
usable anywhere. It has an extremely high-contrast, high-resolution
display, and the access mechanism (turning pages) is a lot nicer
than using a mouse and cursor to scroll text down a screen.
Indeed, I have often thought that, if Gutenberg had invented
the personal computer and printed books had not appeared until
the 1980s, we would now be hailing paper and print as a major
technological advance!
As forward-looking
computer technologists will be quick to point out, things won't
stay this way. Computers will become lighter, less fragile,
and more portable. The quality of displays will improve. Sophisticated
home and office printers will allow production of high quality,
personalized print copies on demand. We may even see the emergence
of programmable "smart paper" ‚ allowing development
of devices that combine the virtues of the portable computer
and the book. But, for the moment at least, the hardback, the
paperback, and the electronic no-back have significantly different
properties and roles.
Getting
the Reader's Attention
The first
task of a book ‚ especially a trade book that's supposed to
attract an audience ‚ is to get itself picked up and read. So
the hardback City of Bits has a vivid, colorful dustjacket
to catch the reader's attention; it's carefully designed to
stand out on a bookstore display or a library shelf. When you
take it in your hand, you find a brief description and author
biography on the flyleaf. Then you can flip through it to see
what's inside.
The Web
version clearly had to attract attention in very different ways,
and making sure that it did so was a key to success. Several
strategies were used.
First, a
hot-link was made from the entry in the MIT Press's online catalogue
to the City of Bits site. So ‚ much as bookstore browsers
can pick up a copy of the hardback ‚ Web-surfing catalogue browsers
can immediately get their hands on the online version. And the
first thing that the online version presents is a Welcome page
with links to a Synopsis, the author's Home Page, and the Table
of Contents. Thus, to provide one path into the online City
of Bits, the metaphor of an "electronic bookstore"
was fairly closely followed.
Hot-links
from other Web sites provide a second way in. City of Bits
was quickly listed in many online, classified Internet and Web
guides, "Cool Sites" collections, online newsletters
and magazines, home pages of organizations and individuals who
wanted to draw attention to it, and online reading lists for
classes of various kinds. Some of these links were sought and
negotiated by members of the City of Bits WWW team, but
many appeared spontaneously. Most were one-way, from the other
site to City of Bits, but some were reciprocal ‚ a fixed
"you point to me and I'll point to you" arrangement.
The ultimate effect was to create a very large, electronic "catchment"
to collect potential readers and efficiently funnel them to
the site.
The third
strategy for bringing in readers is to attract the attention
of Web search engines. Typically, these engines explore the
Web periodically to create large indexes and directories, then,
in response to users' queries, employ these indexes and directories
to provide very rapid access to the relevant Web sites. They
perform their explorations in a variety of ways-by looking for
specified keywords in the titles or headers of Web documents,
by scanning through the documents themselves, or even by searching
other indexes and directories. They are usually pretty dumb,
since they just look for keyword matches. So, to make sure that
your site is not missed by the search engines ‚ which have now
become very important tools for finding one's way around the
Web ‚ you must make sure that the appropriate descriptors are
included in titles and headers, and in the text of the opening
pages. Incidentally, you can reliably attract a lot of attention
by scattering words like "sex" and "nude"
through your text ‚ but it may not be the sort of attention
that you want!
A fourth
possible strategy, which we have not used, is closely analogous
to pinpoint direct-mail marketing. When Web-surfers access your
server, it is technically possible to collect a lot of information
about them ‚ who they are, where they are from, what links they
followed to get to your site, what browser they were using,
what they looked at, and so on. If you are prepared to ignore
the obvious privacy issues, you can use this information to
target electronic advertising. So, for example, Web-surfers
who looked at MIT Press online catalogue entries for other books
on related topics might get email promoting City of Bits.
Reading
Tools and their Effects
In traditional
fashion, the hardback version of City of Bits is a narrative
divided into chapters on different sub-topics and it has a table
of contents and an index to guide the reader through the material.
This allows for multiple styles of reading; you can follow a
continuous thread straight through from beginning to end, you
can jump immediately to particular chapters that interest you,
you can use the index to find passages on particular topics,
and you can even cruise the index (or the endnotes) to look
for entries that may pique your interest. You can skim quickly
or you can read more slowly and attentively. You may make notes
as you go, or you may not. You may read in strict sequence,
or you may jump back and forth.
The physical
book is not only a repository of the textual information, but
also a reading tool that allows you to pursue these strategies
efficiently, and gives you context and feedback as you do so.
Its size and shape tells you roughly how much information it
contains, and you always know how far through it you are from
the relative thicknesses of the stacks of pages under your left
and right thumbs. The springiness of the paper allows you to
scan quickly by riffling through pages with the book half open,
but the mechanical properties of the binding assure that you
can also leave it open, flat on a desktop, for more extended
and careful study.
Typography
signals the hierarchy of information by visually distinguishing
headings, sub-headings, and body text. A Table of Contents right
at the front, an Index at the very back, and numbered pages,
provide effective search and navigation capabilities. Endnotes,
with numbered references from the text, allow backup information
to be provided without disrupting the flow of the narrative.
The online
version provides very different reading tools. Most dramatically,
there is no index; it is replaced by an internal search engine
that locates instances of user-entered keywords in the text.
From the author's viewpoint, this eliminates the intellectual
drudgery of creating an index. From the reader's viewpoint,
it provides greater freedom; you can search for anything, and
you don't have to rely on the author's judgment about what was
worth including in the index. (I'm told, for example, that many
readers immediately type in their own names to see if they're
mentioned anywhere!)
The hierarchy
of information is also handled differently in the online version,
since the screen can only display a limited amount of text at
one time, since current bandwidth constraints make it undesirable
to download large text files to your browser all at once, and
since scrolling through a long segment of text doesn't work
nearly as effectively as flipping the pages of a book. The complete
text is organized into a hierarchy of small segments, with internal
hot-links providing the interconnections among them. At the
top of the tree is the Table of Contents page providing entry
points to each of the chapters. Within each chapter, there is
the introductory section of text followed by hot-links to the
subsections that it contains. Finally, there is the relatively
short text of each subsection. To allow for sequential reading
of the narrative, without having to go up and down the hierarchy,
there are "previous" and "next" hot-links
at the end of each subsection.
Endnotes,
of course, are handled by hot-links; click on the endnote mark
and you immediately get the corresponding note. (Cross-references
within the text could be handled in a similar way, but there
aren't any.) To maintain consistency with the print version,
and continuity with tradition, the notes are numbered-but, of
course, they no longer really have to be, since there's never
any ambiguity about which note relates to which point in the
text.
Overall,
the reading tools provided with the online version have a very
interesting effect; they privilege the hierarchical structuring
of the book's content and the operation of searching while they
make sequentially following the narrative more cumbersome and
difficult. (It's no accident, then, that CD-ROM and online books
that have these sorts of reading tools have tended to emphasize
modular, classified and indexed chunks of content as in encyclopedias
and dictionaries, to provide dense cross-referencing within
the material, and to construct multi-threaded and branching
narratives-in other words, to focus on anything other than long,
continuous narrative sequences.) The hardback, on the other
hand, privileges skimming, random jumps back and forth, and
the continuity of the main narrative thread. So it's probably
optimal to read the hardback first, to gain an overview, then
to go to the online version for more detailed study and for
ongoing reference.
Fixed-Format
and Personalized
Good graphic
designers exert very considered and precise control over the
look and feel of a printed book. Certainly this was the case
with City of Bits. The designer, Yasuyo Iguchi chose
to set it in Bembo and Meta. She arranged elements on the various
different sorts of pages, and deployed white space with care.
She gave
consideration to its size, shape, proportions, weight, and rigidity.
She chose the paper, the cloth for the cover, and the matte
varnish of the jacket so as to create a particular relationship
of feels and textures. All of this matters. It all adds up to
something that has the characteristic look of a MIT Press book,
and that signals something about the product's style, content,
and level of sophistication.
But the
client-server architecture of the Web does not allow a designer
such precise control of the online version; it may be downloaded
to many different types of display devices, by many different
types of browsers, with many different settings of their various
options, to produce screen displays that vary enormously. This
can be seen as a disadvantage (and typically is by graphic designers,
who don't like the loss of control), and the producers of Web
servers and browsers can try to eliminate as many sources of
unwanted variation as possible. Or it can be seen as an advantage-opening
up the possibility of adapting content intelligently to different
contexts and to the needs of different readers; perhaps every
reader of City of Bits could have a uniquely personalized
version.
The issue
of producer-control versus user-personalization is a philosophical
rather than a technical one; it is technically feasible to implement
systems that support either one or both, and to design online
productions that either go for a consistent look or encourage
personalization. In the online version of City of Bits,
we tried to exert as much control as possible ‚ to assure a
reasonably high level of graphic quality, to remain consistent
with the print version, and just to keep things simple for ourselves.
But, as personalization tools become increasingly sophisticated,
it will become more interesting to try to take advantage of
them.
External
Hot-Links
Perhaps
the most obvious and striking difference between the hardback
and the online version is that the text of the online version
contains hundreds of hot-links to other Web sites with relevant
information on the topics that are discussed. When I discuss
online shopping malls, for example, you can just click to go
and visit one. And, when I refer to Aristotle's Politics, you
can immediately access the relevant passage, online, in either
English or Greek. Thus the City of Bits site becomes
a conveniently organized entry point for exploring an enormous
quantity of related information.
Some of
these external hot-links are to sites that I or my research
assistant discovered and consulted when City of Bits
was being written, but the vast majority have resulted from
systematically going through the text, picking out key words,
and sending search engines out on the Web to find what was out
there.
Whenever
a search engine discovers a relevant site, we link it in. (You
can think of this as a new form of bricollage.) This process
has to be repeated at regular intervals, since the Web is growing
explosively, and relevant new sites are continually appearing.
So the structure of intertextual linkages in which City of
Bits embeds itself is a very dynamic thing, and it looked
very different, after the site had been up for a few months,
than it did when it first went online.
The converse
process is to combat link-rot by identifying and removing hot-links
to sites that have died, shifted to new locations, or become
irrelevant. (If this is not done, a site quickly loses its charm
‚ like an untended garden.) To facilitate this, we employ a
software tool that automatically runs through the text, checks
all the hot-links, and reports all those that don't seem to
be working.
Superficially,
adding these links may just seem to be a more convenient way
to provide endnote citations to related publications. But, on
closer inspection, there are some important differences. One
is the dynamism that I have noted; print endnotes can only be
updated, all at once, when there is a reprint or a new edition,
but hot-links can be updated incrementally and at any time.
Furthermore, you cannot add too many endnotes to a printed book
without making it bulky and unwieldy, but there is no practical
limit to the number that you can embed in an online text.
But the
most important difference is the shift in scholarly responsibility,
and correspondingly in the reader's use of the text, that the
substitution of hot-links for endnote citations entails. Recall
that endnote citations are normally to printed documents that
have been formally published and do not change. A responsible
scholar is expected to check the relevance, quality, and usefulness
of a cited document, and to give publication date and page numbers;
scholars who cite irrelevant or poor-quality publications are
not highly regarded. But the author of an online publication
cannot attempt to take the same responsibility, since the contents
of an externally linked site may change unpredictably, at any
time; I might, for example, discover a site containing the text
of Aristotle's Politics, check it out and assure myself that
everything was in order, and then make the link from City
of Bits ‚ only to discover, some time later, that the operator
of that site had subsequently substituted several hundred pornographic
GIF files for the philosopher's words. So, external hot-links
are very useful, but they have their dangers. Caveat surfer!
As the Web
and similar structures mature, there will undoubtedly be an
increasing number of sites providing stable, "guaranteed"
content, and scholars will have less of a problem. There are,
for example, already some refereed online technical journals.
But the medium does not automatically enforce document stability
in the way print does, so special institutional arrangements
will be needed in contexts where such stability is necessary.
Marginalia
and Readers' Comments
Sometimes
readers like to scribble their comments in the margins of printed
books, and sometimes subsequent readers see these comments and
may even add their own responses, but this usually isn't encouraged
(particularly with library books) and it isn't a very effective
form of discourse. By contrast, online versions of books can
easily provide for readers to add their comments, and for these
comments to be widely available.
In the online
City of Bits, readers can enter an electronic "agora"
directly from the site's front door, or from the foot of any
page of text. There, they can read the (comments) that other
readers have posted. They can also use a simple form to add
their own comments. And they can even insert hot-links to other
sites that they consider relevant. This agora is organized as
a collection of newsgroups, and provides all the usual features
of newsgroup support software.
Over time,
then, the online version of City of Bits has become encrusted
with commentary. It has succeeded in provoking, capturing, and
making visible a discourse in a way that is impossible with
print. And, in the process, the seed provided by the original
text has grown into a considerably larger and richer textual
structure.
This evolution
is fascinating and exciting to see, but it creates some theoretical
conundrums and practical difficulties. The continually growing,
transforming structure is actually the work of many hands, yet
it has my name on it. In the beginning, it was mostly mine,
but it becomes less and less so as time goes on and the online
comments accumulate. At what point does it become inappropriate
to say that it is "my" text? When does it become more
reasonable to call it a collective work?
Who bears
moral and legal responsibility for it? Should I treat the agora
as a zone in which complete freedom of speech is permitted,
or should I, as the author, take responsibility for actively
moderating and shaping the discussion? Should I delete blatantly
irrelevant and self-serving comments? What if advertisements
are posted? What if a reader were to post comments that I found
personally offensive and insulting? (Am I obliged to provide
that person with a platform?) What if a posting were found to
contain slanderous or obscene material, or a neo-Nazi diatribe?
These are not the sorts of questions that arise about scribbled
marginal comments in printed books, but they have been hotly
debated in relation to online newsgroups and bulletin boards.
A book becomes a thing of a different kind when it systematically
internalizes and reports back the discussion that it has provoked,
rather than standing distinct, closed, and aloof from it.
These seem
difficult questions, and general answers will probably have
to be worked out through experience and debate. In the case
of City of Bits, the team that maintains the site has
taken a rigorous "hands off" attitude; we occasionally
go through and clean out the completely irrelevant postings
that sometimes appear, but we leave everything else there. Generally,
comments so far have been serious and responsible, so we have
not been forced to confront any really troublesome dilemmas.
Perhaps we have just been lucky, though.
Reviews,
Mentions, and Translations
Any successful
book soon generates a growing body of thematically related,
secondary, and derivative texts ‚ reviews, commentaries, news
articles, mentions in other works, and translations. The City
of Bits site keeps a running record of this sort of material
(to the extent that the team can keep up with it) and, where
possible and appropriate, provides links to it.
As it turned
out, City of Bits generated a lot of interest, and quickly
received many reviews in both the specialist and mainstream
media. Perhaps naively, we had hoped that we might add the full
texts of all reviews to the site as they appeared. That would
have made accessible another, extremely interesting, layer of
commentary and elaboration. But the world is not quite ready
for that; after a few attempts to secure permissions to reproduce
complete reviews online, and generally getting rebuffed or asked
to pay exorbitant fees, we retreated to the position of posting
short extracts ‚ much as they have traditionally been reproduced
in jacket copy and advertisements. In future, though, it may
not be so difficult to achieve our original ambition; when the
majority of reviews appear in online editions of newspapers
and magazines, and the like, it will only be necessary to link
to them.
As translation
rights have been sold, details on the forthcoming foreign-language
editions have been posted in a Translations section of the site.
When the translations are completed, we will explore further
possibilities. (This will require making new and unusual types
of agreements with the overseas publishers, and it is not yet
clear how these will work out.) For example, we might simply
add online texts of the foreign-language versions to the City
of Bits site. We might go further, and provide structures
of cross-linkages among the English and foreign-language versions
so that multilingual readers might conveniently move back and
forth ‚ a particularly useful capability where words and phrases
do not have very exact equivalents in other languages, or where
there might be ambiguity or debate about the best way to translate
things. Or we might encourage the foreign publishers to develop
their own Web sites for the translations, then build links to
and fro. In the more distant future, it is easy to imagine online
books existing as multilingual, geographically distributed sites
in which you are asked, on entry, what language you want to
use-as in American Express cash machines.
Online
Appropriation
In effect,
the various external linkages from the City of Bits site
appropriate a vast array of existing textual fragments and combine
them to form a new work ‚ something that, because of the selection
and organization that goes into it, is significantly greater
than the sum of its parts. The original City of Bits
text, as published on paper, is just one of these constituent
fragments ‚ though, to be sure, a privileged one. (This shifts
to a radically new context the old idea, recognized in intellectual
property law, that a collection can be a creative work.)
This strategy
of textual appropriation and collage does not run into the sorts
of intellectual property difficulties that would arise in creating
a large, cross-referenced print collection, since the constituent
fragments are merely pointed to rather than reproduced. The
author of an appropriated text does not lose anything in this
way. On the contrary, authors usually post texts online because
they want them to be noticed and read, so it is an advantage
to attract linkages that might channel readers from other texts
and sites.
In sum,
an important new literary role has now emerged ‚ that of the
link- editor who locates fragments of text online and combines
them into original literary structures by superimposing patterns
of linkages. On a large scale, the operators of Internet guides
like Yahoo! play the link-editor role by selecting and classifying
online material and providing convenient point-and-click access
from a topic list. Pedagogues play the game when they link words
in books and articles to online reference works ‚ dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and so on. Critical scholars play it when they
create structures of comparisons and contrasts among texts.
The City of Bits team certainly played it when they constructed
the online version. And, by now, the online City of Bits
has been appropriated into a great many online constructions
created by others.
When I have
discussed this form of appropriation with other authors, some
of them have been greatly disconcerted by the idea. They do
not like the possibility that their work might be used in ways
they cannot control and for purposes that they never intended.
(They forget, of course, that authors have never really had
very much control over the uses and misuses of their published
texts. But embedding in online link structures does make this
possibility dramatically explicit.) Others, including myself,
are excited by being able to see with new clarity the evolving
roles that their texts play in ongoing discourses.
Stabilities
and Instabilities
As we have
now seen, the online City of Bits has both stable and
unstable elements. The core text, which corresponds to that
of the print version, does not change. But the structure of
links that it carries is continually adjusted and extended,
the contents of the externally linked sites evolve, and the
accreted structure of comments, reviews, and translations grows.
If I decide to do new print editions, I expect to add the text
of those to the online version, and to preserve the earlier
edition texts as well. Thus any change in the core text will
be carried out in well-defined, modular increments.
A more radical
possibility would be to make continual small changes to the
core text to reflect new developments and to respond immediately
to comments and criticisms. (There is no technical difficulty
in doing so.) That way, the text would be kept constantly up
to date; there would be no need to keep using an increasingly
obsolete and unsatisfactory text while waiting for the right
moment to put out a complete new edition. But this would destroy
the logical integrity of references within the overall structure.
What if, for example, a reader's comment refers to a specific
paragraph in the core text and that paragraph is subsequently
deleted or significantly altered?
Perhaps
the most satisfactory approach would be to preserve successive
versions as incremental changes are made. Some fairly straightforward
software could then automatically relate comments and other
linked material to the appropriate versions. So far, though,
we have not had the energy or the disk space for that.
Whatever
the balance between stable and unstable elements, though, you
never read the same text twice. (Heraclitus would have loved
it!) Even the internally stable elements are continually being
recontextualized, and so shift in their meaning, as the huge
structure that embeds them transforms itself. Furthermore -
an alarming thought for historians ‚ it is quite impossible
to preserve more than a very partial record of the past states
of that transforming structure; it has no distinct boundaries,
it is distributed over many different machines in widely scattered
locations, and it is far too large and complex to back up on
tape. The printed book appeared to give scholars stable, repeatable
text modules to work with. Perhaps that was always a myth. With
online books, certainly, that myth is increasingly difficult
to sustain.
The
End
Hardback
and paperback books eventually go out of print. Archival libraries
selectively perform the function of preserving books after that
point. But what about online books? Since it does take some
effort and resources to keep them around, and even more to keep
them growing and changing, they are likely to have quite limited
lives. How long do they stay available online? What is the electronic
equivalent of going out of print? Who is responsible for long-term
archiving?
Answers
to these questions are likely to vary with the type of book,
and may change over time as online publication grows in importance,
but I can give a provisional answer for City of Bits
online. I regard it as a kind of extended live performance in
a vast virtual theater. Eventually, that performance will end.
The site that remains will not instantly disappear, but will
slowly fade away ‚ like an abandoned stage-set-as link-rot sets
in and as additions and updates are no longer made. As time
goes by, there will be fewer and fewer visitors.
In the end,
the City of Bits will be an electronic ruin. Like Troy,
it will cease to function and to live ‚ becoming, instead, part
of the archaeology of cyberspace.