As we look to the past, we find that the historical context behind books has changed immensely through what the idea of a book entails, the content of a book, and the form in which a book may come in. However, although the progression of books has changed over time the ideas behind the codex of the book remains to this day. The codex has allowed for us as content creators, readers, authors, and publishers to build upon books as more than just an object composed of pages of writing, but rather an immersive experience in which we can develop and build upon already created and new ideas. Today the concept of the book has surpassed those before it, building upon the capabilities and understanding of the digital world and digital publishing. Additionally, it is with the rise of artificial intelligence over the years that we are now capable of creating a book in which authors, artists, and artificial intelligence can collaborate with one another. In doing so, we have created an immersive and digital experience for readers within the digital world and brought about new changes to digital publishing. Along with increasing the accessibility behind books. Today publishers cannot only express their ideas to their readers, but also create an immersive experience in which readers can interact with books rather than simply just reading them.
Over the years the content and form of books has been transforming and evolving to build upon the ideas of authors and meet the needs of publishers and readers to, as said by book historian Frederick Kilgour, fulfill society’s ever-increasing need of information (Borsuk 3). As stated in The book by Amaranth Borsuk:
“Different technologies of the book exist side by side throughout its history: tablet and scroll, scroll and codex, manuscript and print, paperback and e-book. Looking at the changing object of the book gives us a deeper sense of the history or relations between form and content that help define it,” (Borsuk 3).
In the past, many authors and artists have used the medium behind e-books to create their own “immersive cinematic and game-like reading” experience taking advantage of the digital space created by such a medium providing books with an even greater importance (Borsuk 224). Today the concept and form of a book has far exceeded those within the past, as we now have books in which readers can have a more immersive and interactive experience using artificial intelligence and holograms within tablet format. The idea that helped to create books today was developed from an idea that originated from Galician school teacher Ángela Ruiz Robles:
“Who patented a mechanical book in 1949 that would use electricity and compressed air to create an illuminated interactive page. While the project was never realized, Robles continued to develop the idea, patenting and prototyping her Enciclopedia Mecánica (Mechanical Encyclopedia), its successor, in 1962 to condense the number of textbooks young student would have to carry,” (Borsuk 231).
With our technological advances over the years, it is through the collaboration of authors, artists, and artificial intelligence that we have created books within a tablet format that projects holographic images while you are reading immersing you within the text.
With the development of books over the years the mechanical reproduction of such texts has revealed to us that the form a book takes in turn can shape the content of that book (Borsuk 111). According to Borsuk:
“The mechanical reproduction of both texts and book objects in the industrial age and the start of the twentieth century helped solidify the codex as an efficient, portable, marketable object, available in hardbound or paperback covers, and distributed through networks of bookshops, libraries, and book fairs worldwide,” (Borsuk 111).
Now, with that in mind the question remains, what is the technological production process behind today’s books? It is, of course, through writers that the texts for today’s books are written, but once that process has been completed artists work to collaborate with such writers in creating images, diagrams, or sketches for such texts. It is then that artificial intelligence takes that art and converts it into three-dimensional images that can be projected through the screen of a tablet. As stated by Borsuk “When digital books make the interface a visible and integral part of the narrative, we begin to see the extent to which any book is a negotiation, a performance, a dynamic event that happens in the moment and is never the same twice,” (Borsuk 247). It is then that content creators, authors, or publishers then publish these works digitally giving them a platform and allowing for them to become easily accessible to readers around the world.
With these technological advances in place in the process of digital publishing and creating books today, we have allowed ourselves to think of the form and content of books as more than what the codex intended them to be. In his work “Twenty Minutes into the Future” George P. Landow states that “We have already moved far enough beyond the book that we find ourselves, for the first time in centuries, able to see the book as unnatural, as a near-miraculous technological innovation and not as something intrinsically and inevitably human,” (Landow; Borsuk 64). The form that a book takes place and the content within it, especially now, allows for readers to have an immersive experience with the digital world in allowing them to interact with the text through holographic imagery that can be interacted with. As mentioned in Jessica Pressman’s work “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in the Twenty-First Century Literature”:
“The book will not become obsolete with new reading platforms, but rather, will change and develop new incarnations and readerships; it will continue to serve certain kinds of literacy needs and literary desires – specifically, those related to its book – bound physicality and potentiality,” (Pressman; Borsuk 64).
The development of books and digital publishing up until this point has allowed for different ways in which readers can interact with the text, but it is with this new formatting of digital books that the interaction between readers and the text has reached a whole new level.
Now, although there are many positives that can come from how books are created today in that they provide a more interactive experience between readers and the text, there is something to be said about what can be lost in this process. Being able to interact with holographic images while reading a text can be very helpful and effective in allowing for others to understand the text that they are reading better, such as students and teachers. However, there is a creative loss that comes with the use of holographic images within such texts. Although, the process of an author collaborating with an artist to create imagery for their book creates a sort of an artistic integrity for the author in being able to create a visualization of their ideas, the reader loses their ability to use their own visualizations for the text. When a reader chooses to read a creative digital work, they are provided with holographic images of what the author intended for characters or settings within that story to look like. This particularly takes away from the creative freedom of readers when interacting with such texts as they can no longer visualize their selves what they believe a particular character within the story may look like as you would have been able to do in the past. Additionally, there is also the loss of non-digital texts as everything now is within a digital platform.
In conclusion, it is through this exploration between the digital and non-digital forms of books within the past and now that we are able to understand how the format of texts today can be seen as both an advantage and disadvantage within the digital publishing world. Content creators, authors, and publishers have now created an immersive and interactive platform for digital publishing. These texts today exist for authors and artists to collaborate in truly immersing their selves within the creation of these texts and their content. It is also with these texts that readers are now able to interact with the text and get a more immersive experience from what they are reading along with having the ability to access such texts from anywhere. We can allow ourselves to explore even further the digital world and the importance and influences behind digital publishing. However, the downside of this is that there no longer is any imaginative implementation that can take place for readers in interacting with these texts taking away from their enjoyment of these books. Although historically there is always a give and take with the development of anything, especially books. In the end, we can say that “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book,” (Mallarmé; Borsuk 134).
Work Cited:
Borsuk, Amaranth. The Book. The MIT Press, 2018.