We don’t read a book the same way our ancestors read a papyrus scroll. Reading formats demand specific usages and influence our relationship with the written text. While images dominate and print can no longer keep up with the accelerated pace of this 21st century, the issues surrounding the digitization of books are more relevant than ever.

The history of writing and reading is linked to the history of formats. Ever since the first text was made available in digital format by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois on July 4, 1971, we have entered the period of e-incunabula. In 1970, at the Palo Alto Research Center, Alan Kay conceptualized the Dynabook, the ancestor of portable computers, which he imagined at the time as an e-reader. Nicholas Sheridon and the Xerox team designed the first rewritable electronic paper, the Gyricon. By the 1990s, a new kind of e-paper was developed in the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Joseph Jacobson, cofounder of E-Ink Corporation, acquired by the Taiwanese company Prime View International in December 2009.

New reading interfaces

Ever since we entered the 21st century, there has been no doubt that we are transitioning from five centuries of print publishing to digital publishing. The new reading devices representative of this mutation can be classified into four families, presented briefly in the order in which they have impacted our usage. We should consider them as interfaces between the content and the readers, and distinguish the evolution of screens from that of paper.

First, office computers and laptops, destined to be replaced by touchscreen tablets and cloud computing: As mobile computing is on the rise, the permanence of desktop computers in homes, then in offices, is doubtful. Next, dedicated e-readers, of which the first was commercialized under the name Librié in Japan in April 2004 by Sony: Their use of e-ink technology, with no backlight, reproduces the effects of ink on paper, thus offering the same reading comfort as print. Then smartphones, among which the first to have had an impact on reading was the Apple iPhone in 2007. Finally, touchscreen tablets, which since 2009 have changed our relationship to reading through books enhanced with videos and multiple animations, driving an emerging generation of pure-player publishers.

E-paper, which is starting to be produced in rolls like paper, with color and video, has a bright future ahead. But screens, such as Oled, are also making progress. For example, Sony has used OTFT (Organic Thin-Film Transistors) technology to develop prototypes of rollable video screens. Has the codex book been nothing more than a parenthesis between papyrus scrolls and rolls of Oled e-paper?

New reading pratices

Backlit or not, these devices still pose the human problems of ergonomy and affordability. They don’t elicit spontaneous usage as e-readers. Actually, they are often multi-purpose. But what was the visible relationship in usage between a clay tablet and a papyrus scroll?

With connected devices offering a single rewritable surface, the notion of page disappears. The number of pages no longer has any real meaning. It tends to be replaced by the estimated reading time. Reading becomes more fragmented, hypertextual, less linear and more extensive—as well as more and more social, along with the development of social networks, blogs and wikis. Lastly, it becomes more and more nomadic and therefore connected, in the cloud, or even streaming on demand, like listening to music.

The mere fact that print is not hypertextual is enough to condemn it. Readers of the 21st century want content that is more and more customizable, updated in real time, geolocalized and participative.

Enormous stakes

This mutation of formats, this transition from « book » as object to services linked to reading, is all part of our computing reality, while it impacts our writing practices. The gradual loss of handwriting in favor of software applications can just as well liberate our creativity as lead us to a Fahrenheit 451 situation.

The destiny of books and reading today seems to be in the hands of the online and entertainment industries. Amazon. Google. Apple. The crucial question now is whether digital culture can still be enough of a counterweight so that new reading devices can be emancipating, just as print was, beginning in the 16th century.

The stakes are indeed enormous. The novel was undoubtedly linked to the codex format. Today, new narrative forms are starting to emerge with transmedia. In this model, the same fiction is simultaneously developed on various platforms (e-readers, smartphones, connected TVs, game consoles, etc), with platform-specific content exploiting the particular merits of each one. Each format then becomes a different entry point that immerses readers even deeper into the story.

By modifying our reading and writing practices, these new formats also modify our capacity for cognition and memorization, as well as our vision of the world. Our changing worldview is particularly unstable, as digital territories invite us to reconsider reading beyond the book.

With the metamorphosis of books as containers and their volatility as contents, we must imagine reading interfaces for the end of this century, at the confluence of the Internet of things, augmented reality and artificial intelligence—a mentor-book, of which science-fiction author Neal Stephenson was perhaps the prophet in The Diamond Age.

Lorenzo Soccavo
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

Lorenzo Soccavo is an independent researcher of books and publishing in Paris. He is the author of Gutenberg 2.0, le futur du livre (M21 éditions, 2008) and the essay De la bibliothèque à la bibliosphère (2011, digital edition published by NumérikLivres and in print by Morey éditions). He regularly speaks about the issues and challenges of digitizing books, as a teacher and a lecturer. Blog: http://ple-consulting.blogspot.com

Subject: Re : interview questions
Date : Saturday, December 3, 2011 00:43
From: Jean-Pierre Balpe <xxxxx@gmail.com>
To : emmanuel guez <xxxxx@yahoo.fr>

You’re one of the pioneers of world electronic literature. It still remains relatively unknown to the general public. Why?

Literature doesn’t really exist outside of the institutions that commercialize it, vulgarize it, teach it, defend it, promote it, etc. Electronic literature is an orphan in this case, as it doesn’t fall within traditional institutional channels. The rise in power of e-readers could have changed this situation, except that they were taken over by book institutions in an almost caricatural way—an Amazon Kindle buyer, for example, can only order from Amazon. Moreover, these institutions, which are all directed by staff with conventional training, not only don’t know what to do with electronic literature, they don’t even know that it exists. Anyway, the « general public » is only interested in bad literature, the kind that sells and corresponds to the selection criteria of established literary institutions. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter…

In regards to generative writing, where does the writer’s work come in? During the coding? In this case, isn’t it more about rhetoric than poetry?

No matter how automated, there is no literature without a writer, that is to say, without an author determining the rules, defining the world and piloting the programming. Only, this writer’s job is more than that, he’s what I call a « meta-author », an author who analyzes his writing desires in order to create models and exploit them with a computer. I don’t see how this is about the difference between rhetoric and poetry; these two elements, if there really is a difference, have so far only served people trying to analyze texts by extracting relatively abstract concepts. Programming texts is not at all based on these approaches, which aren’t practical. For example, the notion of « metaphor » allows us to describe manipulations in the language of the texts, but it doesn’t say anything about how to program these manipulations, because it’s on a level that’s too general and non-operative. Generating texts must rely on other, radically different approaches. Similarly, the notion of grammar, which seems so important in describing languages, doesn’t in any way inform a programming approach. As to the coding, it only represents one level of the programming approach, which is actually independent of any one programming language. The code is a restrictive tool, but it only plays a small part in designing the modelization of the text.

Isn’t writing from a generator implicitly recognizing that writing media and writing machines determine the content?

There has ALWAYS been a relationship between writing technologies and content. Oral poetry is not written poetry, literature before the book doesn’t follow the same criteria as after the book, and the relative standardization of book formats strongly influences their content. So, writing with a generator simply follows this general rule, and the main goal is not to make it obvious, even if, obviously, it’s also the case.

Some MIT students developed SCIgen, a generator of Computer Science research papers that can be submitted to conferences, in the spirit of the Sokal affair. Have you been attracted to the art of forgery and spoofing, a practice that is rampant on the Internet ?

No, that’s not what I’m interested in…

When you write a blog for a hyperfiction (La Disparition du Général Proust), are you not both author and character?

Hyperfiction is made for the Web, a space of constant games of hiding and exhibitionism, where none of these are contradictory. I thought it would be interesting to play with that aspect by using all the technical possibilities of the Web: characters with their own Facebook pages or blogs, constant references among themselves, ambiguities between real and fictitious biographies, advertising spoofs, links to other sites outside the hyperfiction, employing both real and modified images, etc. I am therefore the author of the whole set-up and one of the possible characters who bears my name, which doesn’t mean that it’s really me. Not any more in this case than the personal investment that every « classic » author puts into his characters (Flaubert, Mme Bovary, c’est moi…, etc). I am always playing with the notion of identity as it is rendered operational on the Internet. We know that Facebook tries to combat false identities, that it hasn’t succeeded and that meanwhile it archives all the data. It would be interesting to know what percentage of this data is fictitious. I believe that « role-playing games » take up a lot of that space.

For La Disparition du Général Proust, you asked a few artists (Nicolas Frespech, Grégory Chatonsky…) to participate. Do you also welcome writing from people on the Internet who are unknown to you?

There’s a bit of everything in this hyperfiction, which modestly tries to imagine a literature specific to the chaotic and multipolar space of the Internet, including welcoming voluntary or involuntary outside suggestions. The poems of Marc Hodges to Gilberte, for exemple, were based on drawings by Jean-Blaise Évequoz which underwent digital treatment that was beyond his control. From the moment you upload anything to the Internet, it becomes a common object that is subject to a form of collective intelligence and creativity. This is precisely why the notion of « property » is inadequate.

Aren’t you afraid that these blogs will disappear along with the companies that host them? What solutions have you found for the preservation of your texts?

We are mortal, and I don’t have the pretension of believing that my literary lucubrations will be any exception. In fact, some of the sites that I created have already disappeared; you can find traces of these disappearances on other sites. Disappearing on the Internet is strange, because what has disappeared on one site can somehow turn up on others. I’ve already noticed this several times concerning my own work. I am deeply materialistic, and if I’m interested in generativity, it’s for the particular possibility of eternity that it allows. My generators should continue to produce beyond my death if someone activates them somewhere. For this reason, I haven’t searched for any solution to archive my texts that is less important than archiving the generators. But I also know that the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA) and the National Library of France continuously archive a certain number of sites. Perhaps I’m already among them…

Advertisements appear, does that bother you?

They are part of this space, and I’m allowed to play with them too.

You’re planning to work with Grégory Chatonsky in creating a drama generator that will give directions to the actors. What form will this generator take? Will it be more author or more director…?

Why do you want to assign specific roles? What’s interesting about the computer model is precisely being able to mix, transform, shift the roles. I already did this type of show at the Maison de la Poésie in 2010, or before with the Palindrome dance company. What interests me in this case is to see how I can play on the actor-author-computer ambiguities. So the generator will be everything at once…

Do you agree with those who claim that the Internet will produce as many great changes in literature and the arts (I’m thinking especially of the performing arts) as the invention of print?

Yes, of course… and we’re only at the beginnning.

Emmanuel Guez
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012

Three pages of php, 20 connected computers, just as many people writing together for 30 minutes, adding and deleting three texts. In 2009, at La Chartreuse in Villeneuve lez Avignon, the Net artist Annie Abrahams presented three experiments in shared writing.

The live audience observed a strange phenomenon: the act of writing in which they were participating had become a combat. The final text was destined to be read. That meant that, in order to be read, each participant had to elbow their way through, by modifying and deleting the words of others, by writing faster and longer than the others, by seizing the kairos, that opportune moment which leads the winner to victory.

As is often the case, Annie Abrahams’ devices and protocols make people write like crazy. « Make » them write, because for the past few years, her writing machines don’t write, they make people write. Annie Abrahams has been a Net artist for 15 years. Her digital literary works and online art (Being Human, 1997-2007) already spoke about the painful relationship between the body and the machine. Since 2007, the artist has been doing online performances that involve other people’s faces. In order to question loneliness.

It’s not obvious that interconnected machines have eliminated loneliness. On the contrary. Human relationships are built on one’s attentiveness to another, to their gestures, their rhythms, their face, and not on what they want to tell or show us through the intermediary of the Internet.

With extremely precise and repeated protocols, involving very diverse personalities, Annie Abrahams’ online performances, such as The Big Kiss (2007), Huis Clos/No Exit (2009) and Angry Women (2011), refuse to flatter the utopias of a society that is pacified and content with mere machine play. Annie Abrahams begins at the beginning, that is, with intersubjective relationships—the affects and affections, as Spinoza would say. In short, she starts with ethics to better meet politics.

Emmanuel Guez
published in MCD #76, “Writing Machines”, march/may 2012