 |
Introduction A Brief History of Print The End of Books Hypertext What Is The Book? The Novel Is Dead This Is Not Science Fiction Monkeys & Typewriters In Defense of The E-Book Conclusion References |
The end of books?
|
| Hypertext |
Nearly a hundred years after Scribner’s published Uzanne and Ribar’s story, writer and literary critic, Robert Coover, released an article also titled “The End of Books” in which he argues that the print medium is doomed. “[T]he very proliferation of books and other print-based media, so prevalent in this forest-harvesting, paper-wasting age,” Coover writes, “is held to be a sign of its feverish moribundity, the last futile gasp of a once vital form before it finally passes away forever, dead as God”. The usurper, in this case, comes not only in the form of a new technology, but also a new literary genre: hypertext fiction. Though certainly not as old as print, hypertext has a history that extends back to the early days of the computer. In the 1940’s Vannevar Bush conceived the memex, an imaginary information storage and retrieval machine described in his now frequently quoted article, “As We May Think.” Twenty years later, Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines discussed the creation of a computer system that could write in hypertext, that is, “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen…a series of text chunks connected by pathways”(qtd. in Greco). By the 1980’s, seminal works in hypertext fiction such as Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story and Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden were published on floppy disk. It wasn’t until the early 1990’s, however, that hypertext fiction obtained its own branch of criticism and attained a level of popularity high enough to make champions of the book, in its printed form that is, extremely nervous. |
 |
 |
| Tara Stephens School of Library and Information Sciences |