Introduction

In 1494, Sebastian Brant published in Basel, Switzerland a book entitled either ‘Narrenschiff’ or ‘Stultifera navis’, widely considered the most important work of fifteenth-century German literature, though it has no plotline but rather a series of 112 versified comments, each framed within tiny chapters rarely longer than a single page. Each chapter deals with a distinct type of madness and the lunacies to be found in the world we inhabit. Of all the different types of madmen and lunatics described who could board the ‘ship of fools’, Brant refers to book collectors, to those who cherish, worship and protect their books from the onslaught of flies, though these fools do not actually read these books. In the drawing that accompanies chapter XII, a man sits before a lectern in his private study where the walls around him are covered with shelves full of books. He wears a nightcap on his head which conveniently covers his donkey ears while wearing a jester’s cape appointed with jingle bells; he waves around a feather duster to shoo flies away and, very curiously, he wears spectacles to read a volume in his lap. This is the depiction of the Buchernarr, i.e. the ‘book-fool’.

‘There is a very powerful reason,’ says Brant’s Büchernarr, ‘for me to be the first on board that ship./For here I have great stores of treasure, of which I understand not a word.’ Later, while in the company of learned men citing scholarly tomes, he snickers with delight, saying ‘I have all these volumes at home’. He compares himself with Tomoeo II of Alexandria, who hoarded books without acquiring the knowledge they contained. Thanks to Brant’s book, the image of the ridiculous erudite scholar reading a book with thick spectacles on became an icon across the Western world.

Brant’s book was published precisely at a time when publication of books using the new technology of the printing press was exploding, but these mass-produced books co-existed with the publication of hand-crafted manuscripts, which were costly and slow to produce. This metaphor is easily transferrable to today’s print-published book vs. electronic-published book dichotomy, to a battleground where contemporary thinkers are staking moral stances in favour of or against the authenticity or falsehood of the eBook vs. its predecessor the printed book either entrenching themselves in defence of the established order or embracing the novelty of what is to come. In both cases, we find ourselves faced with categorical statements on both sides of the equation, of what true reading is all about.

As information technologies have developed over the last forty years into the predominant system of communication they are today, the intellectual process of evaluating the true nature of reading has been intensifying, though vacillating between those who resist them and those who consider them a utopia. As early as 1962, McLuhan forecast the emergence of a virtual communications space and the immediate downfall of the printed document (2011a). In 1970, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext and founded the Xanadu Project (Borges, 2002); until the 1990s, this Project was merely an experimental brainchild until the web gave it an operational foundation on which to develop into a reality. The modifications applied to the concept known as the written document, and to the reading of written documents, over the past four decades have directly affected book publication as new technologies are being used to write, produce, read and share books. In 1992, on the occasion of the Annual Conference of the International Publishers Association (IPA), Microsoft’s Head of Electronic Publishing, Dick Brass, announced the disappearance of the printed book, and it was not even a particularlynovel announcement. In 1996, ‘The Future of the Book’ conference nurtured by Umberto Eco was held in Italy; the highly provocatively titled event was attended by the world’s most important supporters and detractors of ‘the digital turn’.

Before the definitive consolidation of the Internet as the global communication system par excellence, many had predicted that the book would follow the same demise as records when CDs and then downloadable mp3s came out, and that they would simply become collectors’ items which could interest those interested in such rarities. Doomsayers clearly saw that new technologies which delivered online contents would cause the demise of the printed book.

This early, and overly drastic, conclusion was logical in light of the new possibilities that the Internet afforded, which included cheaper and faster sales and distribution channels than conventional book markets that involved a myriad intermediaries ranging from the author and the editor to the printer and distributor. The new technologically-mediated network would solve many of the problems that had nagged the book production sector for years, and it could do so all at once. Such problems included book storage, returns of unsold books, production deadlines, and a great many others. Observing what was happening in the world of music production, many editors quickly pronounced their intentions by investing early and heavily in technological innovations, fearing that failure to do so could lead to them being shouldered out of future business opportunities and even being forced out of their traditional market niches if they woke up too late to new technological trends. This rather optimistic mindset about the future of digital publishing was also taken on board by sectors outside of the book publishing industry, drawing heavy investments into what was perceived as a potentially successful market with new business opportunities at the juncture of publishing and new technologies.

There was a time when a lot was made of the concept of ‘disintermediation’ (Smith, 2000) and many editors and agents in the publishing supply chain tried to imagine where and how to position themselves in order to assure themselves of the brightest possible future in a world where an ever increasing amount of contents could be administered and delivered in digital formats without the need for traditional intermediaries.

Precisely at that same time, Robert Darnton offered his view of the state of things, though casting a completely opposit picture:

Many at the time, and afterwards, agreed with Darnton that the printed book was the most near-perfect communicative instrument ever attained in human history for transmitting and preserving thought. Informing this discussion were not only longstanding conceptions of what culture and history meant to the different intellectuals weighing in with Darnton and company, but also longstanding notions of how books were meant to be stable bastions against change. To this group of intellectuals, any modification in the format of books would mean a modification of the very nature of book production itself and would therefore signify a change in how we perceive of culture and history.

Therefore, a central question, and one of the major issues we will address in this introductory chapter, is ‘What is a book?’. As we try to tackle the answer to this question, specifically as it applies to books in today’s world where conventional and digital technologies are coinhabiting, others also emerge: ‘To what extent are new technologies altering traditional notions of what books are?’ ‘What notions have changed, in both qualitative and quantitative terms?’ These questions will frame the following introductory discussion.

From books as objects to books as systems: towards a new understanding of books

In 1911, Thomas Edison thought that books published a century later, in 2011, would be like this:

Margueritte Duras, when asked in 1985 what she thought books and culture would be like in the year 2000, offered this vision:

At the year 2000 Annual Conference of the International Publishers Association (IPA), Dick Brass stated that by 2005 sales of electronic books and newspapers would reach a billion dollars, by 2008 sales of electronic books would match printed book sales, by 2010 authors would be acting as their own editors, and by 2012 campaigns in defence of the lame-duck printed book would be under way. He also predicted that all of the collections in the Library of Congress will have been digitalised by 2015, that in 2018 the last paper newspaper would be printed, and that from 2019 onwards the first definition of a book in all dictionaries would be a substantial piece of writing accessible by computer or personal electronic device.

Each of the three figures mentioned above have a completely different understanding of what a book is, for the term ‘book’ cannot be understood in exactly the same way by authors writing in the nineteenth century (Edison) or the mid-twentieth century (Duras) or the twenty-first century (Brass). Perhaps the book is indefinable as an object because it is more like a living thing, as Robert Escarpit (1965) stated, gathering this conclusion from the very diverse approaches that had been expressed about books in essays published over the long period of time since books were first created.

Contemporary research on books has attempted to define them from a number of different angles, many of which are clearly paradoxical. For instance, one approach highlights how books seem to be absent insofar as what is expressed within them is ephemeral (Manguel, 2009) which is what Kafka certainly meant when he said that ‘one reads in order to formulate questions’ (Tessio, 2010). This absent character of books seems to reinforce the notion that one reads in order to partake of a conversation; publishing a book, says Zaid (2010), is to join in an ongoing conversation, and the book is the means of being heard in that conversation; according to Millán, this act of schoarly or artistic creation is often socially cloaked in the vestments of prestige and power (1996). Other approaches consider the symbolic status of books as cultural artefacts (Olson, 1998): ‘The book is a fragment of space where language is linked through transgression and death … books become the essential place for language origination and propagation, yet they are essentially without memory’ (our translation, Gabilondo, 1997).

Book definitions can be divided between two basic camps, i.e. those who consider books mainly as material objects,² and those who consider them as transmitters of messages of a sociological and semiotic nature. Chartier and Cavallo (2011), citing Michel de Certeau, state that:

Chartier had already agreed with this view, stating that ‘books are subject to multiple individual readings, which can be socially contrasted’ (1993, 2011a), a sociological perspective that deserves his attention for it examines books as components of a literary circle aimed at the mass consumer, for whom these objects become simply consumer objects. Thus, Raczymow considers that books have become merchandise, subject to the whims of supply and demand, and subject to the unbending rule that the subsequently published book by an author makes the previous one obsolete (Raczymow, 1994). These sentiments are similar to those expressed by José Manuel López de Abiada, in whose opinion books are also subject to the relentless laws of the market, which in part depend on subtly programmed advertising orchestrated to improve sales (Lopez de Abiada and Peñate Rivero, 1997), which in turn, according to Bertrand Gervais, turns books into machines churning out reading material (Gervais, 1994).

Only by taking fully into account all of the phenomena that intervene in the making and distributing of a book can we realistically describe what a book is in today’s world.³ Reminded as we are of Laufer’s (1985) words when he said ‘there exists no text without a support for it nor does there exist such a thing as a truly blank book but rather a book waiting for its text’, we find that the task of explaining a book simply in terms of its material form would be absurd and simplistically similar to one-sided explanations based on syntactic and semantic flourishes of the texts books contain. The typography, as Laufer pointed out, would be no more than the latest and most supreme form of writing and of communication.

For 500 years, the definition of books has essentially remained unchanged: a set of sheets of paper or like material which are bound in a single volume. Definitions such as this one, based on the definition provided by the staunchly conservative Spanish Royal Academy Dictionary of Spanish, have been around in largely the same form, with slight derivations, for this long span of time. Even the most aseptic definitions, which conceive of books in mere conceptual terms, fit within the framework of the 500-year-old definition of books that has prevailed up until now; here is an example of one: ‘non-periodical printed material which has 49 pages or more, excluding the covers’ (Unesco, 1964). Despite the fact that publishers and technological developments in publishing have been improving the way books are compiled and presented, until recently end-user identification of books has never been problematic, for they have typically been associated with a clearly-defined paper-based format, a format which has always given the book a certain unified, even self-contained, character. And recent developments in paper- based book publishing have greatly improved in terms of design and materials, which has led to better recognition of brands in bookshops and libraries, and to better legibility, among many other developments. The appeal of a book’s cover and binding, the container, determined the teleological character of the volume’s contents, for on the inside there was a closed, autonomous and final message, with no outreach beyond intertextual references to other texts published in other volumes that had gone before. The conventional book was part of a hermetic ecosystem, symbolised by the library as a metaphor of an apparent disorder which the book eventually manages to prevail over the ecosystem with what Chartier defined as the order of the book, or the order of books. The legislation of countries which have a legal deposit system for preserving books establish that in order for a document to be preserved there must be a material object to protect.

Electronic information technologies have radically changed the very concept of what books are, the ecosystem which books inhabit, and even the legislation that governs book preservation.

The appearance of electronic books on the market, the new features associated with eBooks which can be accessed through e-readers and Tablet PCs and the applications that run on them, and the e-r eading blogosphere, social reading systems, and so on, all of these new elements have stretched the seams of traditional definitions of books. The conventional UNESCO definition of books is outdated insofar as it does not apply to an ever-l arger part of what is currently being published; though these should be considered books, they do not meet the criteria of existing terminology. Roger Chartier (2001) has warned that one of the main problems with understanding the transition from one support medium to another is that we lack the intellectual categories needed to break away from our canonical conception of books, and that our symbolic references remain anchored in thinking of books as paper-based volumes and in thinking of the conventional way that books create messages and transmit them. Thus, the expressions we use invariably link books to a paper-printed medium, seemingly excluding and negating the existence of books in their most recent and highly developed form. American economist Gary North, reflecting on the many U.S. citizens in the early twenty-first century who preferred paper books to electronic books, coined the phrase Picard Syndrome to refer to this tendency: in a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation, starship Enterprise captain Jean Luc Picard is caught reading a paper book and thus using a technology which everyone on board involved feels is shockingly outdated (Cordón-García, 2011).

The truth is that over the course of the last few years, the ecosystem books inhabit has experienced a radical change that has challenged all of the links in the traditional publishing chain. These changes affect the function of editors as intermediaries in the publishing process; traditionally these figures guarantee the formal and conceptual quality of textual contents, and they design and maintain collections that establish an economy of prototypes which their coherent editorship keeps within clearly-defined boundaries. The changes affect the role of booksellers as points of access to printed books and also the role of libraries as institutions that safeguard and categorise knowledge. These changes also affect authors’ intellectual property rights and the economics of writing. The crisis of the intermediaries in the publishing world forces each agent to reinvent himself or herself and come up with new structures that will enable them to survive in a new digital ecosystem, where an entirely new culture is emerging from an economy based on exchange, collaboration, reputation and self-branding, interaction and integration. In this new digital context, a divide has opened up between conventional readers and a new mode of readers who are more and more accustomed to electronic reading.

Knowing that a document exists does not explain the reason for its existence. Until recently, studies into written communication were mainly concerned with studying the chain of written communicative events. This methodology is based on establishing a chronology of events starting from the creation of a text and following the processes of reproduction, distribution, preservation and reading. Scholars would begin by making inquiries about the author, and tackling such issues as his or her intentions, how the text came into being and what its features are, the genre, the author’s style and so on. Such basically literary studies went on to address the relationship between the author and his or her editor (Did the editor read the work and make suggestions?, Did the editor critique the work?, Did author and editor sign a contract?, and so on) and they would analyse what information was available about the manuscript preparation, the page layout, and any relevant commercial data. Also examined in such studies was the relationship between the editor and the printer (printing equipment used, printing methods, print run), the marketing and distribution process, the role of large commercial booksellers and libraries, and also readers’ reactions. The methodology described above could be applied on a number of different levels, including the synchronic, diachronic, sociological and historical levels. This way of studying written communication, especially literature, relies on a strict chronological conception of the publishing process in which each stage triggers the next. In order for a text to be published it must first be created, and only then can it be edited, distributed, preserved and communicated. The resulting study is often a description of the succession of publishing operations.

In contrast to this imminently descriptive conception of publishing, there is another way of conceiving of written text communication, namely as the response to an individual, societal or cultural need. In this systemic view, the need for individual and collective information of a sociopolitical or cultural nature pressures the community as a whole, and as a result texts which satisfy those needs tend to emerge. Written texts are one such response, and they are the result of subsystems that publish, disseminate, distribute, preserve and transmit them.

The questions that this view of book production tends to examine concern the functional relationships between the different subsystems. They tend to conduct comparative studies of the underlying needs as a causing agent, the written text as a response, and the subsystems of book production, dissemination, distribution, preservation and transmission as elements that can constrain the response. Such studies allow scholars to explain the written communication they have examined and determine its qualities and deficiencies.

Books themselves are a means of producing meaning. This concept goes well beyond the simple idea that books produce the information they contain. Books become a part of a social system that includes authors, readers, editors, booksellers, critics, librarians and many other social agents. Books produce and are produced by the social system as a whole, and they are essential agents in the cycle of production, distribution and consumption. Studies by Mckenzie (2005), Mcgann (2006), Chartier (2008), and Genette (2007), among others, discuss the systemic relationship among the works, the authors and the readers, on the one hand, and the role of the literary system that they create, maintain and partake in, on the other.

De Certeau and Johnson maintain that when attempting to understand cultural artefacts embedded in a social circuit it is essential that we clearly identify all the cardinal points within the system (Nunberg, 1996). It is a mistake to make contrastive analyses from only two different points of view within the circuit, for instance from the point of view of authors and their influence upon readers. Scholars who argue against traditional conceptions of books often defend paper-printed volumes, not from an all-encompassing conception of the whole social circuit of publishing which weighs in all agents, but solely from the standpoint of a single agent, typically the author. In isolation, these author-centred arguments make it seem as if the book had some sort of malignant, authoritarian influence on the passive reading public. An example of polarised arguments against the traditional book can be found in Sterling (2009), who argues that printed codices are but burdensome material forms that constrain the information they contain; he believes that with the technology we have today information can be released from its material shackles. Sterling’s approach ignores the essential role that that the book plays in channelling information consumption and production and in maintaining a socially-based information system. In his view, the publication process is essentially absurd, because instead of breaking down material barriers, it creates new ones. The manuscript, in views like Sterling’s, seems to be the true form which drives all of the various stages of book production towards artifice and emprisonment.

However, when considered as part of a broader social system, publication cannot be so easily portrayed as an act of censorship, but as an act of socialisation, as Mckenzie describes it (1999). Unpublished manuscripts alone have a very limited scope of influence, as they lack the coherent forms and guarantees that make them attractive to general consumers. Publication is the process by which a public artefact is produced and inserted into a specific social mileu. In fact, general intelligibility of manuscripts is owed not to writers autonomously producing information but to readers and their understanding that each text fits into a wider literary system. Manuscripts are not read as the purest forms of books but as incomplete versions of future books, prototypes of the artefacts that they strive to become. Giving manuscripts coherent public forms calls for a more productive endeavour. This explains how what scholars such as Sterling consider material limitations are in actual fact social resources that would somehow need to be reconstructed or re-engaged, should the printed book format ever disappear. The reconstitution of the social construct would have to take place in order for electronic books to maintain the status of their texts. Chartier rightly points out that the meaning changes when the form changes, and Mcgann (2006) calls such a changing system ‘the interlinked network of linguistic and bibliographical codes’. Ziman (2011) has also argued that science is also a product of similar sociomaterial processes that create ‘public knowledge’ and insert it into systems where they can be consumed. Barnes (Mazzotti, 2008) and Latour and Woolgar (1995) reach similar conclusions. In a subsequent publication, Latour states: ‘If technology can be described as something so powerful and yet something so small, or as something so concentrated and so diluted, this means that it has the characteristics of a network’ (Latour, 2006). Merton also discusses the ‘communal’ character of science, stressing that major scientific breakthroughs are the product of social collaboration and can be attributed to the community rather than to individuals (Merton, 2010). Systematic changes go beyond specific semiotic effects and alter our understanding not only of what things mean but also of why they are important. New publication models liberate documents from the ‘barbarity’ which is accepted as a part of the transmission process (Benjamin, 2002), they discover the ‘forgotten’ connections among the agents in the social system, and thus they capture the full extent of the complexity of the editing/publishing world.

From the text on the web to the web book

The likelihood that structural factors in a specific field, in tense critical interaction with each other, will lead to a crisis that could trigger extraordinary, exceptional or random events unthinkable under normal conditions, events that for the field are inefficient and socially meaningless, is highest when the effects of many latent, high-intensity conflicts converge and disruptive strategies rather than sustainable strategies emerge as the response. Disruptive technology is defined as innovations that lead to the disappearance of previously available products and services; disruptive technological strategies seek to compete against a dominant technology by means of progressive consolidation of a market around a newly released technology, which it is hoped will be the dominant technology of tomorrow. A system of discontinued technologies like the one we have described above has been fostering the emerging market of electronic books and the likely future consolidation of the market towards this new technology in a process that Filloux and Gassee (2012) have called the ‘Great Disruption’. According to these experts, ‘the eBook will become the publishing market’s primary engine. Authors will go digital-first and the most successful will land a traditional book deal with legacy publishers.’

The entire framework for conceiving of books and reading in existence up to the end of the twentieth century hinged on a belief in the book as a single concept and book publication as a stable, virtually unalterable system, a system marked by invariance within a general evolution (Cordón-García and Lopes, 2012). The changes start to speed up during the second half of the 1990s, when the explosive growth of the Internet adds an entirely new dimension to human communication.

The Internet substantially changed the whole constellation of interconnected bodies involved in the publication process and it has changed the very notion of what is meant when we say ‘publish’,⁴ skewing all connections between such conventional notions as accessiblity, dissemination, promotion and reception of published texts. Many of the traditional stages where mediation once took place in the publication process have now disappeared; this is the case of publishing houses and editorial committees, which are no longer needed to legitimate the value of a text, and also the case of copyright and intellectual property, no longer essential in the economy of published text exchange (Cordón-García and Alonso-Arévalo, 2010). On the Internet, to ‘publish’⁵ is often understood in imminently quantitative terms, for one of the virtues of electronic publication is that institutional and economic barriers to publication and dissemination no longer exist. We are often reminded that anyone can produce a document and make it available to thousands, even millions, of readers. Based on what we have seen about the historical evolution of communications and the ease with which new texts can be published online, each generation has an ever greater number of documents it must somehow face.⁶ The Big Data concept discusses a scenario in which the body of information faced by each generation grows exponentially: according to Gartner (Kalakota, 2012):

According to IBM estimates, humans have generated approximately five exabytes, i.e. five billion gigabytes, of information since the dawn of the species up to 2003. In 2011, it is estimated that we generated this same amount of information in the span of just two days, and in 2013, we will be generating five exabytes of information every ten minutes.

Our capacity to use information technology is clearly challenged by the myriad devices, applications and new functions we have at our disposal. These include GPS locators, cell phones, Facebook likes, e-commerce transactions, closed circuit video surveillance images, instant messaging, and many others.

Up to now, each successive phase of technological development coincided with an institutionalisation of technology-associated discourses and the development of specialised terminology and communication patterns. On the one hand, these discourses curbed reader expectations of new technology and, on the other, they channelled technology-related information into increasingly specialised circuits that helped facilitate the acceptance of new technologies.

The discourse of electronic information technology, however, completely broke away from that process. This happened firstly because electronic publication drastically increases the proportion of readers to authors. Self-publishing systems such as those launched by Amazon via Kindle Direct Publishing, Barnes and Noble via Pub It, and Apple via Ibooks Author have allowed hundreds of thousands of people who could not break into analogue publishing to become published authors of electronic books. Often using the editorial services offered by self-publishing platforms and harnessing the synergies each platform offers, thousands of new authors are seeing their texts published and in a more visible manner than they would have been if published traditionally. In addition, the quantitative difficulties increase as a result of the qualitative difficulties. There are few formal editing control systems that vie for the quality of web-published texts. On-line documents are often read not as sources of information but as a means of gathering intelligence on a topic, which requires documents to be explicitly identified as one or the other. The linearity, structure and stability of the traditional publication model, which generation upon generation of readers have taken for granted, is now becoming diluted. As Birkerts has stated (1994, 2010), new forms of communication determine our sensitivity and our senses. While print-publication is linear and subject to the rules of logic and syntax, electronic and multimedia communication are produced under a very fragmentary set of rules where intuition is of paramount importance. The syntactic masonry of the conventional is replaced by the intuitive accumulation of the digital. The idea of what a text is has changed in step with technological advances that are continually changing the models of text production, dissemination and reception under the digital paradigm. We are now at a turning point, where the text no longer will be a self-contained entity but where it is an open-ended, permeable object, an object which can be moulded through the participation and inputs of the networked society taking shape as we speak. Electronic documents replace sequenced and cause-effect models of text production with a model based on the integrated and continuous activity of the Internet community. In fact, rather than speak of texts as products we could speak of texts as processes in which a written work remains permanently open for further development.

The importance of the Internet, therefore, is not that it offers a comfortable alternative location to print-publication but that it is a place where new discourses are emerging on every url address and in every online discussion forum. Text genres become on-screen hybrids, or they migrate from paper to digital formats where they become interactive (think of how paper-published novels have been made available for Smartphones).

Daniel Cassany (2009) discusses how being connected to a worldwide network is one of the most salient characteristics of on-line writing and reading. Off-line writing and reading involves electronic texts stored on computer hard drives or on removable memory devices such as USB drives, CDs and DVDs, though these are processed without being connected to the Internet:

According to Chico Rico (2009) electronic texts which are merely digitised versions of print-published texts remain constrained by traditional notions of communicative effectiveness and linguistic form as well as paper-print norms of coherence, intentionality, acceptability, situationality, intertextuality, informativity and efficiency. The only difference, Rico says, lies in the channel of communication used in each case: while the print-published text is conveyed by means of a physical document, the electronic text is conveyed by means of a computer screen, and on most occasions, over an Internet connection. Texts created specifically for electronic, on-line communication contain added features such as hypertext links and multimedia files, and they are characterised by being multilinear – i.e. text linearity is variable rather than always the same by default – interactive and virtual.

The new ways of reading correspond to the new modes of creation, in which linearity is replaced by multilinearity, syntactic coherence and semantic complexity, and where completeness of final texts is replaced by writer–user interactivity and open-ended virtuality, generating open spaces that preclude divergent intentionalities. Images become ever more important in these new creative processes, as the need to include them in electronic texts feeds further change in text creation. As Rodríguez de la Flor (2009, 2010) has postulated, images are increasingly used instead of text. The latest technological advances have increased the points of intersection between the media and the physical or electronic support medium, leading to a completely different reality than what the Gutenberg galaxy conception of books and reading had ever envisioned. The postulates put forth by McLuhan and Fiori (2001), who describe the printing press as a sort of repetitive resource, have developed into a conception of text production as a set of multiple juxtapositions in which the roles of text creator and receiver overlap and intertwine in the generation of text meaning. Digital text production is being seen as a palimpsest in which the number of devices, contents, authors and receivers, in exponentially increasing reticular interaction with each other, determine that the vehicles of expression and patterns of consumption must accommodate not only written text, but also visual and audio text as well. The printing press, closed, linear discourse, immobile layout on the fixed page, and textual content enclosed within an unchangeable container are all being substituted by another dimension of reading in which digital natives and digital immigrants alike can deal equally well with texts written and printed by ‘Homo Tipograficus’, and also with those of ‘Homo Videns’. It was precisely McLuhan and Fiori whose collaborations were groundbreaking in that they were the first to show what the standard of author–reader interactive texts of today would look like. At the time, their texts were called Tipophotography, a neologism coined by media theorist László Moholy-Nagy to describe ‘the visually most exact rendering of communication’ (Eskilson, 2012). Steven Heller describes this new way of writing as follows: ‘[Fiore] strongly believed in experimentation and was not just attempting to navigate through McLuhan’s disjointed prognostications, sarcastically mocked by [critics]: he was actually attempting to construct what eventually evolved into a primitive iteration of “the information superhighway,” using the paperback book as its bedrock foundation’ (Popova, 2012). This palimpsestual style of narrating, according to Remírez (2010), affects not only the communicative ecosystem but also the text itself, comprised as it is of different overlapping levels or strata which the author uses to guide the reader’s experience, though the author can only do so within the limits of the reading device and the algorhythms of the operating system and applications. Remírez believes the digital text can be broken down into the following levels.

Level 1: the text which the reader reads

The text the reader reads can be different each time it is read, for the reading experience involves hyperlinks, interactive involvement, different story tracks, and so on. This upper stratum of the palimpsest is not the level which truly defines the work, for it does not fully represent the work of the author, which is much broader. Nor is this level fully controlled by the reader, as at first it may seem. The apparent freedom of action is a mirage behind which lurk the lower level codes, which take on a more determining role in the reading experience.

Level 2: the set of potential texts available to the reader (i.e. the corpus on which the reader’s reading is based)

As in the stratum above, there may be many different reading paths but these are pre-determined by the writer. This is a very important level, especially insofar as the writer’s creative role is concerned, because the next lowest level determines the quality of the text read by the reader. If the author gets this level right, the final result will be a pleasant reading experience.

Level 3: the algorhythms that create or combine texts

This level is virtually imperceptible to the reader (and even to the author), but it is important because it is an author-controlled stratum which defines the entire reading experience. The algorhythms that the author creates are fixed, immobile and pre-determined. No matter how complex and capable of generating different readings the programs are, the way they create the reading experience is fixed beforehand by the author. This is the substrata of codes where the real reading experience is determined. In the upper strata, the reader can see a wide array of paths and links which are programmed not to repeat over the short term, and this ensures a different reading each time. However, this is an illusion, because underneath there is another level of codes that is systematising the uniformity of the reading. If on an upper level readers skip over a new fragment of text, this only happens because this lower level of codes determines that step.

Level 4: the software restrictions of the device running the algorhythms

A digital text is affected by the restrictions of the operating system, the graphics card drivers and the source code processing speed running on the reading device. This level determines the final delivery of the digital text.

For this level, the operating system is key. In contrast with the writer of a paper-print work, in which the printer and the author are responsible for the quality of the final product, the writer of a digital text can never be absolutely sure of how his or her final text will be visualised, except if the digital text is sold with a complementary reading device and programs. Even then, the writer of a digital text cannot be sure that the reader will act in a fixed, predetermined way.

Device limitations, such as electronic ink which is slow and does not support graphic animations or coloured text, limit the reading experience, and file formats display text and images in a wide range of different ways. It is not the same thing to view a digital text in pdf as in epub or in Word.

Level 5: hardware restrictions of the device running the software

Lastly, there is a source code which runs the microprocessor and is essential for the device to operate. These processes are like synaptic charges in the human nervous system: they are vital in our thinking processes, though we may not be aware of the the system while it is working.

According to Remirez (2010), digital literature is made up of layers of code which are stacked one on top of the other, like the layers of a palimpsest. The upper layers, perceived by the reader, are the least important in terms of marking the digital nature of a text, and the apparent linearity and interactivity are only a mirage that masks the underlying layers which actually determine the text. These underlying layers define the quality of the text, though this is not unique to digital literature. The layer of algorhythmic code is what truly sets digital literature apart and what truly differentiates it from conventional literature. This level determines exactly what happens at every other level, even what at first glimpse might seem random. The lower strata are very important in determining what the text looks like and how it will be read. These levels cannot be determined by the author and cause the text to be displayed differently on different devices; these variously displayed text formats generally counteract the author’s intentions and the reader’s emotional perceptions of the work. The effects of the lowest strata in the palimpsest could be overcome in the mid-term by the industry adopting rigorous hardware and software standardisation and also by ensuring safe and timely web transmission processes.

There is a proliferation of examples of new digital textualities. Here is a sampling of a few initiatives.

The Path by Tale of Tales (http://tale-of-tales.com/ThePath/index.html): Developed by Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn with a soundtrack by Jarboe and Kris Force, this digital text is a half-game and half-tale horror story. It combines images, animations, sounds and texts, which in conjunction create an enveloping experience. The tale is an updated version of Little Red Riding Hood in which six children rather than only one are tricked by a wolf. The book succeeds in creating a disturbing, mysterious atmosphere, and the accompanying activities are not mandatory for readers to turn the pages. The characters move about in impressive 3D scenarios which contain many activity links.

Insula smaragdina (http://www.rogerolivella.net/insula/es/insula.htm): Created by Roger Olivella, this visual poem uses the same fractal formulas as Koch Island, which is a subset of Lindenmayer System fractals. Using a Latin phrase which is repeated ad infinitum, the fractal formula generates a ‘drawing’ of the text, at any scale, which repeats the words following the mathematical pattern. The text generated looks like a caligram, though it was created by a computer using a mathematical formula.

El jardín de los relatos inacabados [The Garden of Unfinished Stories] (http://dl.dropbox.com/u/140S91S0/selva29S.html): Created by Félix Remírez, this is a digital work in which the reader must explore a tropical garden scene in search of dozens of story beginnings, the kernels for ideas that the reader might want to pursue by continuing each story. There are beginnings of different kinds of literary texts, and the location of each text is not easy to find, as the reader must search for the images while the scene scrolls from right to left. The animated texts pop out when clicked on, though the scene continues to scroll, forcing the reader to get through the texts quickly if he or she is not to miss one of them in the continuous loop.

Bookworld: Another interesting experience is that of Bookworld, which is an experimental project designed by Lecteurs.com Orange and Bookapp. com. In Bookworld each book is a city. The central district symbolises the book’s structure. Each chapter is a tower of greater or lesser height, owing to which the structure of the book is defined as a unique skyline that is characteristic of its organisation. Around this central area the suburbs are the discoveries made by readers: descriptions of people, places, and outstanding objects appearing in the book, but also quotations, references to other books, summaries, and comments on the work. As readers increase the complementary information, these suburbs grow until they become potentially more important than the heart of the book itself. For instance, if two books are about the same subject or refer to the same character, the two cities become neighbours in the world of books, and little by little this world is arranged in a rich and complex network.

In this collective construction readers can play different roles. Depending on their activities, some become searchers, critics, biographers, geographers, or any of the other trades that the application offers. As a whole they help to retrieve a multitude of details and to weave connections between books and build a real world. The application for IPAD Bookworld allows navigation through this continuously growing world in 3D, discovering new books and also new places and new things courtesy of the intermediation of users (Kaplan, 2012a).

Digital porosity is invading all fields and is also contaminating the printed environment through concepts of heightened reality by means of which the static pages of a stable and immobile work open up to the multimedia universe thanks to the intervention of the appropriate software. This is what Layar does; it is an application for iPhone and other advanced telephones. The page of the book or magazine is captured in the device, and a superimposed layer appears on the screen with sensitive points, which on being pressed lead to complementary information. This is somewhat similar to what happens with the Clic2C application, which allows access to dynamic multimedia content from an image treated with watermark technology.

The publishing house Alfaguara has launched the first title produced using this technology. This is the work ‘Anizeto Calzeta’, a children’s book that is apparently nothing out of the ordinary. However, when it is read on a Tablet, iPad, iPhone, or a telephone with Android the application begins to intervene. The program allows any image of the book to lead to different multimedia contents through the use of pixels indistinguishable to the human eye.

One of the most important characteristics of these resources is that they would appear to reproduce the conditions of discourse of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the sense of what is public was mediated by a series of transitive personal relations anchored to the immediate connections of clubs, tearooms, social meetings, etc. It is perhaps not altogether surprising that the forms of discourse that arise tend to reflect those of the pre-information era. The participants tend to be quite at home with the ‘official’ forms of communication in the field to be discussed. However, their exchanges do not have the flavour of newspapers written in the modern age. Firstly, the right to give an opinion has expanded. Websites, blogs, wikis, social networks, etc. invert the effect of the nineteenth-century pair-bonding and professionalisation of the disciplines that Raymond Williams (1983) described as a transition from the republic of letters to the bureacracy of letters, in which a writer can no longer speak for himself or herself but is rather ‘obliged to be continuously declaring his or her style and department and to be subjected to an examination of his or her objectives and credentials on the frontier of each field’. In this sense Derrida (Gaston and Maclachlan, 2011) suggests that electronic communication has been significant in the process of transforming all the public and private spaces of humanity and first of all, as he says, the limit between what is private, what is secret, and what is public or phenomenal. In any case, as Floridi (2012) suggests, the Internet has transformed the physical citizen of modern society into a disincarnate and decorporalised inhabitant of the postmodern cybercommunity, introducing him or her to the new dimension of an electronic forum.

The power that has been achieved by the new resources has generated the hypostasis of the person by the system in such a way that access to the public is regulated by the rules of the resource. This is the case of Twitter and Facebook, the organisation, syntaxis, and internal rules of which end up conditioning the form of participation; they become so important that anything that does not fit into them does not exist as a cultural product. This has led to the appearance of new figures and new functions such as those of the Community Manager, a kind of administrator of the communication processes at any company or institution that intends to establish a presence on social networks, but also that of genuine experts on a medium and its conventions who act as arbitrators and regulators of a traffic that is ever more intense and monopolises by consensus the valorative and accreditation functions that were formerly reserved for isolated elements or those with a considerable degree of independence within the system. The medium lacks a solipsistic condition: it establishes its own message and feeds on itself. As McLuhan (2011b) maintains, societies have always been moulded more by the way in which people communicate than by the content of the communication itself. The media counsellor has emerged as the thinker of the moment, of the instant, the column, the thought that must needs be weak, inconsistent, detotalising, and at times contradictory, that feeds a communication circuit of hundreds of thousands of followers and tens of millions of messages that grows more powerful daily.

The book as a printed object shows the indelible imprint of the intervention of the publisher, which gives it its formal and conceptual reality and also its legal reality by means of the publishing contract. A book can easily be distinguished from any other printed product due to its aesthetic and symbolic uniqueness, its referential elements, and its image recorded in the collective unconscious that perceives it as such. The publisher gives the work its material form, inscribing it in the exploitation systems that will place in on a legibility scale close to the reader and the author. As Darío Rojo (2012) points out, it is especially interesting to consider the school that proposes that as the book has the power to detach itself from any kind of specificity of genre and in many cases of value, it achieves an elasticity that allows the establishing of a beginning that inevitably refers to an end. This end has a real and symbolic presence at the same time. In short, it has a definite unit in its abstraction that shapes a theoretical object with the necessary precision for any kind of effect beyond any extension of the text. The book constitues an ‘existential unit’.

Digitalisation constitutes the rupture of this universe to allow the multiplication of discourse, indiscriminate dissemination, its multiplied exploitation, its fragmentation and deconstruction, and in some cases its total or partial loss of identity. Furthermore, digitalisation introduces a difference in essence regarding printed works, not only in degree but in both the production and also the distribution and exploitation of the works. The eBook becomes a system that is open and versatile and is continuously evolving. Alain Pierrot and Jean Sarzana (2011) draw up a pertinent classification of digital scales that range from the simple transposition of a printed text to a pdf to the strictly electronic drawing up of discourses with multimedia integration and hypertextual elements of the opening-up of the work. The development of the book is acquiring a totally new configuration that affects the whole system from authorship to reception, articulating business and intervention models that flow along the paths of 2.0 postulates. It is the proposals for the sociabilisation of authorship, production, and reading that are conferring on them a character of their own that is exclusive to a new emerging system (Jankowski, 2011; Shatzkin, 2011). This is being consolidated in its discursive and social practices, not so much in the form of philosophical or programmatic proposals but rather as empirical applications of a technological nature. This is the case of the latest Penguin movement, i.e. the announcement of a new application not devoted to a book but to one of its successful authors: ‘The World of Richelle Mead’, which is already available at Apple’s App Store. Richelle Mead specialises in the genre of urban fantasy and her work is very popular with teenagers. However, ‘The World of Richelle Mead’ goes further: it is based on personalisation (its centre is the author) and connectivity with readers. The application includes social tools. For instance, it allows readers to connect with each other and with the author, as well as the now familiar option of highlighting any sentence and sharing it with ease.

However, the most important modification that has taken place has to do with the same process of the transfer of the information, which has gone from the fleetingness implicit in the earlier oral communication to the possibility of recording and reproduction brought in by the computer and mobile devices. Conventional oral communication has the great advantage of interactivity, of a rapid and flexible exchange, of feedback. None of these characteristics exist when we change to formal circuits, such as that of the book or printed scientific article in which technical requirements make this possibility unviable. New resources represent a step further towards relative formalisation through a register that shares the manner and syntaxes of oral and written communication and of the exchanges and contacts of those involved in the communication, always seeking to expand the limits of its audience in a process that has been encouraged by the multiplication of the sources of intellectual legitimacy.

It is precisely this aspect, that of the legitimacy of information, that has caused most headaches and most controversy and that has offended the most sensibilities among the core of those who give their qualified support to the new resources, and naturally among the ‘apocalyptic’ group to use the apt expression coined by Eco. The stratification of prestige is closely related to communication, mainly through conventionally formalised and stable means, such as paper, that encourage recognition and strengthen reputations. We are however witnessing the displacement of instances of legitimacy and moving towards a concept of what a book is that is becoming more and more distant from its original architecture.

The greatest disadvantage of digital documents from the point of view of reliability and bibliographical control is perhaps that of the integrity and permanence of their contents. Nobody can be unaware of the basically stable nature of printed documents, which undergo few modifications during their useful life, all of which are perfectly controllable. Hence the confidence with which they are consulted, regardless of the years that may have passed since they first appeared. The conviction is held that the content of a piece of work remains identical to what it was when it was published, with any revision that may have occurred in its successive editions being documented. The concept of integrity operates within this context to guarantee the follow-up and control of the various forms or states that any publication has undergone and thus allows the establishing of a kind of dialogue between its various versions.

If the act of publication represents the foundational operation in the life of a work and is perfectly established in the case of printed documents, when we work with electronic networks the primitive act that gives rise to a document is in many cases not subject to any control; the possibility exists of constant changes that hinder its connection.

The document undergoes what we can consider to be a kind of biological growth; in many cases it gradually incorporates comments, additions, corrections, and brief modifications, which transform it into a kind of digital palimpsest in which the latest version accumulates and adapts the previous ones that may have disappeared. In this way the tasks of checking involved in scientific and documentary activities are seriously hampered by a practice that neglects respect for the stratigraphic condition of conceptual evolution. Tomlins (1998) speaks of ‘living entities’ to refer to this changing condition. This author maintains:

Soccavo speaks of Plasmabook or Biolivre. It is precisely the concept of Liquid Books, or Liquid Journal, that reflects these transformations. As their developers point out⁷:

This indicates to us a further characteristic of reading: the capacity for the heuristic treatment of the ideas received through the text. In other words, once a reader manages to go beyond his or her organic conditions and cognitive processes, he goes down a mental road that may prove intellectually enriching, giving way to the construction of more elaborate (lateral) ideas, or what the philosopher Edgar Morin (2005) has called Complex Thinking: this is only possible by the approximation of dialogue in evolution and conditioned by what is heterogeneous, random, and essentially creative. Hermeneutic studies have referred to this capacity for complex reading, fluidity, and with fertile material for the imagination and the understanding of new ideas as ‘liquid reading’.

In Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary (2011) stress the defragmentation of the concept of unity implicit in how the book is traditionally considered, pondering the appearance of systems that make it an open device. Faced with the technocraftsmanship of the analogue context, we encounter the cybertechnology that is characteristic of the digital field. If the book had been considered as a perfect reading machine, as has been declared by Paul Valery,⁸ André Maurois (1938), Robert Escarpit (1965), Foster Edward Mohrhardt (1976), Millán (1996), Darnton (1999), and many more, its logical evolution should assume the developments characteristic of its technological components. This is the sense of the theories of Craig Mod, Frédéric Kaplan, Bob Stein, and François Bon.

One of the most interesting contributions of the new concept of the book is that developed by Craig Mod. The thesis of Mod (2011) develops with the premise that the book is a system and begins by dividing its operation into two stages: pre-artefact and post-artefact. The main characteristic of the pre-artefact stage of the book is that it involves few people, in other words the author, the publisher, and perhaps a muse and a publishing house. But not the reader. Its final product is tangible and operates in closed spaces that are generally static such as classrooms or libraries. As for the pre-artefact book system, Mod’s starting point is that the essence of the matter is that digitalisation has modified not only the idea of what a book is but the very process of authorship itself. In the current stage, that of post-artefact, the essential question is the reduction of the distance between the author and the reader, as well as the fact that the book becomes a strange beast that is completely intangible and in constant mutation. The idea of the book as an object clashes head-on with a combinative versatility with the intervention of formats (Mobi, pdf, ePub, Fb2, AZW, etc.), devices (Kindle, iPad), systems (iOs, Android), and interactivity (video, metanotes in the margin, insertions, etc.). Above all, however, the post-artefact system of books becomes a shared experience. For Mod, the main characteristics of the stage in which the system-book is currently to be found are as follows: an open system, interested in participation, in sharing contents in the notes in the margin, in the community of readers, and naturally in reading. To sum up, it is the transformation of the book from a text container into a shared interface that also occupies other spaces, such as blogs or the exchange of information through platforms such as Open Bookmarks.

This line of thought responds to the expectations required of any revolution; the epistemological context of the success of any innovation will always be determined by its adaption to the social context. As Daniel Innerarity (2011) points out, a large proportion of our perplexity faced with the limits or the ambiguities of the social processes that have been made technologically possible is due to the failure to understand that any technological innovation is carried out within a social context and has social effects that vary depending on the context in which they unfold. This is a context in which social networks and the reader’s independence are becoming more and more important. This contextual relationship had been sensed by authors such as Louise Rosenblatt, who published pioneering articles in which she took a closer look at the relationship established between the reader and the text. As early as 1938 she defined it as a transaction conditioned by psychic factors and the environment which determine the act of reading, and also in the individualised understanding of the text (Rosenblatt, 2002).

The story of the book, its narrativity, and its metaphors at the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century should take this shift into consideration. The most common error in discussions on the subject, as Frédéric Kaplan points out, consists of situating the debate around the advantages or disadvantages of paper over digital supports and vice versa, as it makes no sense to oppose two reading experiences. According to this author, what is relevant is to situate the evolution of the book within the general framework of a theory on the evolution of regulated representations, i.e. a representation in which production and use are subjected to a set of rules that are arranged in two processes: the mechanisation of the rules of production and the mechanisation of the rules of use. It is through this double mechanisation that the representations end up becoming real machines. According to Kaplan, books constitute regular representations in which various aspects must be considered:

The book provides a solution for organising a discourse in the space. In this sense it plays an architectural role insofar as it allows the reception of rich narrations and complex demonstrations. For its part, each book form is associated with differentiated structural rules. What computerisation will allow is the supplementary administration of these structural models, which will have completed the first stage of the mechanisation process. This should be completed by a second stage in which uses are equally mechanised, thus conferring more power to the author-architect.

Kaplan considers three possible evolution scenarios for the book:

Books evolve along the lines of encyclopaedic systems with standardisation on three levels: that of formats, so as to describe the content according to the reading interfaces used; semantics, in which the texts and images used are associated with well defined semantic knots that allow the modelling and accumulation of semantic capital; and the measuring of the uses by means of ‘reading analytics’ that allow the tracing of the trails left by the reader in the book in the form of notes, underlinings, loans, etc. The absorption of the book by the encyclopaedia will open the age of ‘industrial readings’ (Giffard, 2009).

Books evolve in the form of closed immersive applications. The applications will resume the closed form of the book insofar as its developments and possibilities are predetermined by its creators. Kaplan maintains that the applications allow the development of the second phase of mechanisation of the book in that they internalise the possible interactions that may occur in a work. Authors and publishers can conceive the experience they wish to offer their readers with much greater precision.

Books become structuring interfaces to achieve access to the planetary computer, thanks to research developments in the field of electronic paper. From this perspective, according to the author, the book on paper could represent a privileged interface for all kinds of reading activities.

For Kaplan publications with a quasi-encyclopaedic format, such as scientific and reference works, and children’s books and narratives are those that will first assume the logic of standardisation and which are most likely to find a market niche. The latest research of the Book Industry Study Group (2012) confirms these predictions. It was published in February 2012 and reflects the growing tendency of works of fiction and children’s books to occupy a market space that is becoming more and more important.

What upholds these conceptions and what runs through them to articulate a new concept of the book is the emergence of its relational and communicative nature, this being as part of a type of network and with the capacity for the synchronisation of experiences and opinions between authors and readers in a controlled manner, either by using applications or an open one by using encyclopaedic systems. The eBook is moving towards a unified model in the sense attributed to it by Stein (2010). This author indicates that:

Bob Stein (2011a) considers it to be a medium in which the user assumes control of the experience, converting it into user driven media in contrast to other media in which one feels and allows oneself to be led, producer driven media. All the power of the book lies in the fact that it is a medium for reflection, for thought, and for meditation, hence the drawing up of the concept of the social book.

What makes a book an eBook

Establishing the distinctive characteristics of the eBook is extremely difficult owing to its ambiguous nature, halfway between what is tangible and what is intangible, what is symbolic and what is pragmatic. On the one hand, a book is an empirically measurable type of physical object, but on the other a complete and powerful type of metaphor. The problem is that in a digital environment the book represents a metaphor that is too limited to capture the polymorphous nature of the Internet, although it continues to be a very powerful metaphor even in electronic culture. It is not for nothing that the forms of representation with which it appears are still a powerful evocative reference of the printed universe, in forms imitating covers, shelves, turning pages, etc. The cultural perception of the book as a totalising unit of production clashes with the heterogeneity that is implied by the Internet in which textuality lacks all the symbolic charge of its printed predecessor. This malfunction operates on a level of the collective unconscious in the acceptance of the new forms of the production and reproduction of texts. The debates, discussions, and attitudes halfway between what is apocalyptic and what is integrated are in keeping with this logic. As Hubert Guillaud (2010) suggests, the problem is as follows: if the book is basically defined by its material nature, what happens when this disappears? How can we define the book? Or to consider the reflections of François Bon (2011a), is our concept of the eBook a mere substitute in our digital use for a practice that we had assimilated with the traditional book? This is a difficult question to answer as the electronic format which dematerialises the work suppresses one of its main distinguishing marks: the medium.

The challenges arise from the terminology itself as the term eBook not only affects the electronic reproduction of printed books, preliminary and incipient forms of a more complex and long-winded development in its possibilities, but also all electronic texts with an underlying bibliographical metaphor as previously mentioned, although technological proposals are drawing it further and further away from the closed and self-sufficient nature of the traditional book. In this sense the characteristics of eBooks should be studied not by means of allocating the exclusive functions of digital textuality but rather by identifying the inherent characteristics of the system in which they circulate and are involved. In other words (HCI, 2007):

eBooks are dynamic in terms of the adaptabilty of the content, flexible in terms of portability between platforms, portable owing to their fluid configuration on a network, interactive because of their communicability with the user, and hypertextual because of their possibilities of asychronous sequentiality. What defines new books therefore is a series of characteristics that give them an idiosyncracy and a profile that are quite different from those of printed books.

In the first place, their polyfacetic nature insofar as reading environments are concerned. The multiplicity of formats allows the inscription of the digital text on a wide variety of devices to give it a flexibility and capacity of adaptation to very different contexts: e-ink readers, Tablets, computers, Smartphones, PDAs, etc.

Secondly, the retaining of the prototypal nature of each work thanks to the personalisation of the contents to allow reading software. The printed book is part of an industry of contents within which all products are prototypes to a greater or lesser degree: the conception of each one of them is practically a craftsman’s task. However, in order to persuade knowledge, debates, and the imagination of a society to emerge and circulate, the only thing that can be done is to perpetuate specific regulation mechanisms in which individuals play a vital role. The publisher not only situates the products but also gives them coherence by going beyond their nominalist nature. This is so because strictly speaking this uniqueness of the book would mean that a global market would be virtually non-existent given the coexistence of a multiplicity of independent markets, each of which corresponds to a particular work.

This peculiarity of the works is one of the factors shaping the market of symbolic assets that is articulated by the publishing sector. The book has certain symbolic-structural characteristics that give it a clearly permanent direction, in contrast to other products competing on the market. Its individual condition links it intrinsically to a recurring updating either as a result of the market or owing to the mind of the reader who persistently renews the interpretational circuits.

The prototypical nature of the book has been greatly strengthened in the electronic field, as if on the printed circuit its creator were the publisher owing to all the textual and paratextual elements that make up its brand image. On the digital circuit it is the possibilities afforded by reading software and the will of the reader that articulate a multiform and singular segment according to the intentions and tastes of each user by means of the various personalisation elements. If each reading type is the result of the configuration of a series of variables that can be combined to create different reference models (reader type, text type, reading objectives, active or passive attitude, reading frequency, trajectory of the document, etc.), these models are multiplied by the interventions of the reader on typography, line spacing, styles, sizes, etc. This gives rise in each case to enriched experiences, which are likewise fed by the contextualisation of the collaboration possibilities that are implicit in their nexus with a great diversity of general or specialised social networks. We can therefore talk of a general polyphony in which the complexity inherent to intermodality, intertextuality, and hypermediality changes the conditions not only of perception but also of creation. There is a change from the predominance of a linear, narrative, and deductive type of reading induced by the medium, the author, and the publisher towards an open, relational, multidimensional, and personalised type of reading. The situation of the reader changes to determine a paradoxical position regarding reading on a device. On the one hand it underlies in the same way the distance imposed by the machine, preferring the container to the content that is located behind it, but on the other an appropriation occurs through the manipulation of the text and personalises it, which means that it is the content that makes the container ‘transparent’.

What is therefore created to constitute another of the inherent characteristics of the new resources is the liberation of the reader from the authority of the source, as it is he or she who establishes the possible trajectories and encourages those codes and systems that are more favourable for his or her intentions, which vary depending on the reading type and the genre. The reader not only multiplies his or her activities, but also occupies a space that is becoming more and more transverse and porous in the publishing chain, becoming involved in the creation (Furtado, 2012), (BookCountry, a@author) and dissemination processes (personal blogs, websites, social reading sites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). The corollary of this reasoning is that writing, which was a residual aspect of traditional reading in the form of annotations in the margins, underlining, etc. has come to be more and more important in the reading process. Authonomy for example, which was launched by HarperCollins in 2008, represents an attempt to project this new concept onto the field of the book. The website provides not only a platform on which to publish but also a place where the reputation and collaboration characteristic of social networks constitute a publishing model and where interactivity between authors, readers, and publishers takes the form of published or publishable books. Participants on the network do not go to the website in search of a published work or to consult a catalogue or check a piece of data, but rather to try to become a writer as it is the community that decides what will be published. They publish their first drafts or first chapters so as to share them and solicit comments from readers and publishers. It is possible to read both finished works and those in the gestation process, to share what is being written, and to receive the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of readers, publishers, or other authors. Books can be voted and commented on, labelled and shared, and lists drawn up of the most read, most commented on, etc. With these experiences the function of the publisher lies within logic as a part of digital culture, in which the frontiers between the resources are becoming more and more blurred. These become transverse like the generation of books as from the articles selected by a reader in the Wikipedia, or the initiative of the British newspaper The Guardian which has set in motion Guardian Shorts, a new series of books that provide a detailed guide to current affairs, politics, and sporting and cultural events. In Spain, in November 2011, the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia⁹ launched its own publishing house for eBooks, Ebooks de Vanguardia, and already has several titles in the pipeline and collections such as Periodismo de Vanguardia: over a hundred reports and series of articles from La Vanguardia were published in collaboration with Amazon on the occasion of the launch of the Kindle store in Spain on 1 December 2011. The Quick Book concept has caught on in the publishing sector to refer to works produced in a short space of time in keeping with events, which represent a phenomenon of immediacy and are therefore eminently journalistic in tone. This is far from the concept of writing of Elias Canetti, for whom clarity and brevity represent a hindrance to the narrator, as the latter lives from the unpredictable jumps of metamorphosis and an inexhaustible spirit.

As Godin (2011) points out, the configuration of the market is heading towards the exponential multiplication of publishers and the demultiplication of readers, in a Long Tail economy in which each book will be able to find its reader and in which reading becomes socialised. Digital reading considerably modifies the book from the moment when reading becomes public, collaborative, shared, visible and subject to the conventions of new numerical sociability, as is emphasised by Milad Doueihi (2011). This sociability is represented by the existence of multiple reader communities who use general social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., or specialised ones to share their interests in a movement that assumes a more semantic and ontological model, based on the technical possibilities of the networks with the proliferation of tags, keywords, etc., freely drawn up by users according to their reading experience. According to Doueihi, a keyword associates an interpretation or a contextual appreciation of an object (a book) with a reader who also becomes an author as this is an independent form of reading. The keyword or tag modifies not only the relationship between the original author and the document he or she has drawn up, but also the inferences generated in the digital text by the reader. The intervention of the reader does not modify the content of the document but inserts it within a new community space typical of the culture of blogs and social networks, favouring new routes in an analogical context.

This characteristic articulates the singularity–visibility pairing that is included in the logic of what Pierre Mounier (2010) calls ‘Attention Economics’. According to this author, in the old printed book model only the most profitable publications exist as they are subject to the decision to publish them. The scarcity of publications owing to a rigorous selection process is its defining trait. In the new context all publications are available as it is the readers who operate these restrictions. In this situation, in which readers increase in a linear manner and publications increase exponentially, any access barrier has a counterproductive effect and leads to publications being shunned. This is the basis of Attention Economics in which the main concern of publications is ensuring that they are read and for recognition to be achieved by obtaining maximum visibility (Cordón García, 2004). The problem arises when we pass from Attention Economics to Expression Economics within the context of an ever more powerful linguistic capitalism, to quote the expression used by Kaplan (2012b). It is not so much a case of drawing attention as of acting as a mediator between the language and the multiple users affected by its use. There is no doubt that the beneficiaries of this situation are intermediaries such as Google, which generate a controlled linguistic market that is articulated on the speculation of the terms and that favours through different algorithms certain search results based on the value given to the terms. Each word and each term become merchandise.

However, Attention Economics also has an indirect consequence related to authors’ productivity. Up until now the productivity of an author was closely related to his or her literary age. We consider Literary Age to be the number of years that have passed from the date of the publication of the author’s first work to date (or up until the date of the author’s death) (Cordón García, 2004). We can thus refer to year nought, three, twenty-five, etc. of a writer’s career. From the point of view of visibility, the greater the literary age of an author the greater the possibility of recognition and the higher his or her Literary Production Frequency. Two different measurements can be used, firstly that of the actual periods of time that have passed between the publication of one work and the next by the same author, which we call the Actual Production Frequency, and secondly that of the number of works published by the same author divided by his or her literary age, which we call the Expected Production Frequency. These two measurements tend to come together as the author’s Literary Age increases and his or her visibility is consolidated. In these cases the pressure inherent in publishing programmes is considerable, as it obliges writers to contribute to sales circuits with a regularity that responds to the expectations generated in readers.

We should consider not only the concept of Literary Age but also that of Literary Novelty, which refers to the first work of an author who has to make a greater effort to place himself or herself at those levels of visibility that will enable him or her to pursue a literary career because he or she has not yet received any kind of recognition. Cases of consolidated visibility generally fall either to authors with a high literary age or to publishing houses that base their catalogue on them. The risk index assumed by a publisher is closely related to the fact that it interacts with authors from the first or second categories in such a way that a census could be established of the number of novel authors appearing on a publisher’s list so as to justify the renovation movements being carried out. In the digital field the concept of novelty is more forceful owing to the publication facilities inherent in the same. Initiatives therefore arise such as AlphaLire (http://www.festivalpremierroman.com/alphalire/), a portal that has been designed so that new authors can place their first works, which can be read in Streaming from different types of devices.

The concepts of Literary Age, Literary Production Frequency, Expected Production Frequency, and Literary Novelty change significantly in the digital context for various reasons. Firstly, the decision to publish does not depend on a publishing programme that has been pre-established by a publishing or management committee; it is the author who decides on his or her rate of publication, either by resorting to various publishing services or by self-publishing through the many established systems.

Secondly, the publishing houses themselves have accelerated the metabolism of the publication of books, increasing the production of successful authors and facilitating the publication of novelties by less well known authors. The greater visibility of authors and the compulsive nature of purchases with a single click feeds a circuit in which the waiting times between works are becoming shorter and shorter. On the other hand, the insertion of editorial systems within social reading platforms or shared networks has generated a complementary literature that is the fruit of the new relationship between authors and readers, or between readers themselves, which increases the expectations of the appearance of new works by pressurising the publishing chain as to its rates of publication.

There is likewise a digital publication strategy that complements that of printed publication. An author may thus publish minor works in digital form so as to fill the wait for a more solid work whether printed or also in digital form. This is the case of Grisham, who together with his usual books also publishes a series for children: Theodore Boone, the name of the 13-year old main character who dreams of becoming a lawyer, of which several instalments have already been published. Publishers consider that the strategy of the publication of cut-price works (at approximately one euro) every six to eight weeks helps them to attract readers who are not prepared to pay 20 times this amount for a new eBook or printed work. The consequence of this new system is the shortening of the periods of publication frequency for authors, who are compelled to produce new works by the demands of an insatiable machine. In this sense one can speak of a certain Stakhanovism in publishing. The question that is posed by this acceleration in publication times is that of the influence it may have on the characteristics of the works themselves, especially their quality and nature.

A study (Petersen et al., 2011) on the patterns of stylistic transmission in literary works has shown that the influence of works from the past has been fading. Therefore, while eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors were strongly influenced by the writers that had preceded them, those of the late twentieth century no longer suffer the influence of their own contemporaries. Owing to copyright problems, works published later than 1952 have not been studied, but according to their authors this tendency will be maintained in subsequent years, in particular due to the advance of self-publication systems in the digital field. The digital author differs greatly from the analogical one. As Virgilio Tortosa (2008) maintains, only when the artist questions the limits of the new textuality and controls its rules of composition will he or she be capable of generating a work equal to the new medium. The author needs to immerse himself or herself in a new context where different laws prevail in the creation and publication process, the concepts of space and time are redefined, the potential scope is universal, and the role of the reader is decisive for the final result of the work. The traditional qualities of the writer are no longer sufficient; it is now necessary to develop new skills in a technical apprenticeship that sometimes achieves group collaborations and the development of a different mentality in which, as Celia Corral Cañas (2012) points out, the attitudes of extimacy and hypervisibility predominate. Extimacy is used here in the sense coined by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and treated by the anthropologist Paula Sibilia (2008) as a current phenomenon that is revealed particularly in the action of the western human being on reality shows and in virtual spaces.

Furthermore, according to Gérard Imbert (2010) hypervisibility appears ‘when the dividing lines between what is public and what is private become blurred and a pantoscopic glance prevails, in which the outside and the inside merge together’. The figure of the author passes through an intermediate territory in which what is public and what is private merge together, and furthermore in which the interference of privacy or of information on privacy in the media has developed the figure of the polysystemic author, who is obliged to be lavish in his or her interventions not only in his or her most canonical writings, but also on his or her website, personal blog, Facebook, Twitter, and virtual intervention areas by means of which he or she can channel not only his or her work but also his or her life. Reserved author spaces are becoming more and more restricted, as a hybridisation is occurring between what is personal and what is professional in a further manifestation of the pornography of the senses as defined by Imbert (2008). But extimacy is not so only in the sense of the confusion between the territories mentioned, but also by the inevitability of collaborative work on the new digital scenarios. As Guillaud (2012) points out, the passage from analogical to digital represents for any work the acquisition of an added value and the possibility of opening up to new interventions, of including new functionalities which the author does not necessarily have to think about. What is digital inverts the author’s solitary task because it is necessary to diversify cooperation to improve the works. According to Guillaud, collective work no doubt represents the future of the digital book. Authors have to reinvent their trade and their creative practice in order to juggle with possibilities in the digital universe, and they cannot continue to do so on their own.

A third element that distinguishes the eBook is the power of its search systems, both internal and external. Up until now the information systems inherent to it were external, distant, and of relative accessibility. The terminological, bibliographical, and documentary systems that articulated their ecosystem had no direct relationship with the work and its informative context was isolated in nature and in many senses exclusive: a book closed in upon itself not owing to the will of the author or publisher but as a result of the technical limitations of the medium, paper, anchored in an immovable stability. The eBook breaks the techno-craft mystery of paper and opens up the content to a sea of relationships without a continuity solution both from the semantic and documentary point of view and from the referential point of view. Both e-readers and reading applications on Tablets (ibook, Stanza, Fbreaders, Aldiko, Kindle, Megareader, Goodreader, ePagine, Bluefire Reader, Kobo, Readmill, etc.) include search systems that allow the analysis of the occurrences of any term in the text, searching for its meaning and contextualising it in the corresponding paragraph. Moreover, it makes it possible to recover any intervention that has been made on the content: underlining, annotations, notes in the margin, etc. so as to generate a metadocument that is integrated with the main text through the series of relationships established by the reader. The search also takes on an external nature through the enriched elements that works tend to have: hyperlinks to other works, to other authors, to places, to reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc., i.e. external linkings that are not strictly textual but also both sonorous and visual.

There is moreover another powerful search tool associated with eBooks and linked to visibility and their bibliographical control: this is that related to metadata which is the series of information describing a digital object, which in the case of the eBook includes the author, the title, the price, the number of pages, the format, the DRM type, etc. The information provided by metadata is essential for all players in the book chain in that it allows publishers to exchange data between them, the feeding of private websites, the incorporation of information on administrative databases such as those that can be used by bookshops, the production of catalogues whether electronic or printed, etc. In the publishing field metadata are of a communal and dynamic nature. As Benhamou and Guillon (2010) point out, they play a key role in the control of work-promoting tools, giving them greater visibility and therefore a greater capacity of projection. Their existence guarantees the recovery of a work by a reader, a social network, a search engine, etc. The visibility of an author, a title, or a publisher will therefore depend on the quality of the metadata included in the work, and this is an aspect to which particular attention has been paid by publishing professionals. With the metadata the text becomes semanticised, and the terms acquire an additional value that transcends their own inner meaning. A bibliographical reference is not only a descriptive line within the work but is recognised as such by the e-reader. The same thing happens with names, proper nouns, etc., which go beyond their condition of words in the text to acquire the differentiated character that grants it their condition of a piece of metadata, its labelling.

A fourth characteristic is the conversion of books into new documentary territories (Guillaud, 2010). In these territories books enter into a mesh of complex relationships through which they become real systems of documentary administration, terminological and referential sociograms through which it is possible to reconstruct the whole scheme of influences and mentions that appear in them, together with that of the interventions of users. As Bob Stein pointed out (2009), reading ceases to be a solitary act to become one of meeting and collaboration. The book as an object becomes a book as a network in the sense attributed to the latter by Manuel Castells (2004), i.e. a type of organisation of variable configuration with great flexibility and efficiency, where the important thing is the interconnection of the various nodes. The book incorporates fluid circulation systems, in other words the possibility of moving in one direction or another according to the supreme criterion of the reader, a synthetic possibility that is expressly included in the concept that characterises this function: navigability, i.e. the capacity to move through the contents without a continuity solution depending on the points of interest delimited by the reading. The eBook provides lanes for circulation through the network in the mass of knowledge, thus encouraging a fluid dialectic relationship between the perspectives of the author, the publisher, and the reader, dominated by the possibility of fluctuation and decentralisation, and therefore enabling free combinatorial analysis. The book is currently defined not so much by its content as by its structure, by the existence of a delicate system of tendons and nerves which is the apparatus of both internal and external references and links. The book sets itself up as an access system to the world of knowledge, which allows circulation near it. The determinant concept in the new electronic field is that of circulation: the possibility of moving about within that area of reality superimposed on the others constituted by knowledge on all subjects, with it being possible to go from backwards to forwards, initiate various paths, explore, discover, and establish connections. The concept of the book as an object is transferred to that of the book as a service. For François Bon (2011) the eBook constitutes the establishment of an economic circuit based on the payment of a service rather than on the transferring of a material object.

The problems posed by this new characteristic are twofold: those related to concentration and attention to the text and those relating to the perception of the latter. As recently as 150 years ago popular novels were considered to be senseless distractions that hampered concentration. In a well-known bestselling quality self-help work, Erich Fromm considered detective novels to be harmful to any exercise of concentration. Mistrust has now been transferred to the digital field in general and to that of eBooks in particular, or rather to the reading devices that allow them to be consulted. Julie Bosman and Matt Richel (2012) maintain that the eBook is located in the centre of a network designed to distract attention. Reading on connected Smartphones or Tablets with Internet just a click away, always waiting just below the surface of the page, represent a permanent source of distraction to the reader.

A study carried out by the Nielsen company showed that people took 20 minutes longer to read a book on Kindle or an iPad than to read the printed version. Although the reason was not established, many quote this study as proof that people lose the ability to focus and that these digital devices are not yet capable of reproducing the experience of the printed book. Precisely one of the reasons why Amazon launched Kindle in 2007 with no further applications than that of reading was to enable people to read without disturbance.

In a study carried out by Kate Garland, a psychology professor at the University of Leicester in England, the participants were taught an intensive course in economics. Those who were taught from an eBook needed more repetition of the information in order to retain it. Those who learnt from a printed book were capable of assimilating the material more quickly and more completely (Crow, 2012).

Researchers believe that the problem may lie in the lack of physical signals or associations that the memory can use to remember the information. The context and the points of reference are important to go from ‘remembering’ to ‘knowing’. Apparently irrelevant factors, such as remembering whether something has been read on the upper or lower part of the page, if it was on an odd or even page number or near a graph, can help to consolidate recollection in the mind.

Initially this would seem to be irrelevant, but the spatial context may be particularly important given that, according to cognitive psychologists, evolution may have shaped our minds to remember location signals easily so that we can find our way back home. This is why since antiquity great memorisers have used a trick known as the ‘loci method’ by means of which a fact is associated with a place located in a known space, for example the rooms in a house, so that memory is recovered merely by going through them.

According to the neuroscientist Mark Changizi (2011):

As Morineau et al. (2005) point out, the book can be considered to be the physical representation of a body of knowledge, the nature of which is evoked among other things by the paratextual elements it includes (the cover, the flaps, etc.). In this sense they demonstrated the existence of a powerful cognitive association between the information and its physical context by means of an experiment that was carried out with traditional books and eBooks with the aim of examining the possibilities of each regarding assimilation, memorisation, and other characteristics related to the understanding of the information. In general the features were very similar, but they emphasise that the lack of memory indicators such as those mentioned above hinder the reminder effect and the contextualisation of the information that are guaranteed in a conventional book.

The loss of these contextual elements is inevitable in a device in which hundreds of books can be stored and in which the user only views the page he or she is currently reading and what has been read or remains to be read is a simple numerical indication.

For Alan Liu (2009) any new means of information appears to degrade reading as it interrupts the balance between focal and peripheral attention. For this reason time is needed to adapt to the new context so that the pre-existing balance can be restored, not only regarding the reader’s ‘mentality’ but also in the set of social systems that articulate the reading environment.

Reading well is like playing the violin, the critic Dana Gioia maintains. It is a skill that requires high-level cognitive skills that have been practised over a long period. She thinks that the transmission mechanisms are being broken up with the advent of digital reading. However, Larry Rosen, a psychology professor, thinks that these kinds of affirmations are erroneous as students’ reading levels have increased and their lives revolve around words. His opinion is similar to that of the gerontologist Gary Small, for whom the Internet activates more areas of the brain than a traditional book (Pham and Sarno, 2010).

In keeping with these arguments, technology has attempted to provide solutions to or to address the problem of the distractive nature of the features associated with reading devices, in particular Tablets.

Experiments such as that of the Visual Editions version for iPad of the 1960 novel by Marc Saporta, Composition no. 1, follow this logic. In 1962, a year before the publication of Rayuela in which Cortázar broke the linearity of the narrative by inviting the reader to choose the order of the chapters, another literary ‘shuffle’ appeared in Paris. It was signed by an unknown author: Marc Saporta. In 1960 Raymond Queneau founded the Oulipo Group in search of new literary structures. Saporta did not belong to the group, but his work could be ascribed to that school; in a note at the beginning he asks readers to mix up the loose pages he or she will find so that his characters will develop in one way or another depending on chance. The book-box was a kind of ars combinatoria that required an active reader. Saporta made the physical book a metaphor for a disorderly memory, and his characters are pieces of a collage with a title alluding to an abstract black painting on which splashes of colour explode. Saporta’s experiment has been transferred to an electronic medium by Visual Editions. In Composition no. 1, each page is independent in itself and the reader may read the set of pages in any order, combining them at will, shuffling them as if they were a pack of cards. With 148 pages the number of possible combinations is enormous: a kind of Oulipo in which the verse or the sentence is replaced by a full page. Moreover, the iPad application makes the pages move across the screen at top speed and the letters mix at random to form curious images (visually artistic but not necessarily literary); the reader must take the decision to stop the movement and read what he considers that he should read almost intuitively (Montfort, 2011). In any case these are experiments that, although they claim the reader’s full attention, are no more than isolated experiences and cannot be transferred to conventional reading.

Although distractive elements may be important, the evolution of reading practice and the synergies contemplated in it compensate for the disadvantages of works that might be complex for undocumented reading but are familiar to those used to the implicit elements contemplated in them. An example is the novel by Bernardo Gutierrez ‘#24H’ that has been published by the publisher dpr with a Creative Commons licence under a Copyleft system by Lulu.com and Bubok.

According to the publisher the work is a blog-book-account that relives 24 hours from 16 to 17 May 2011 on a planet called Internet, just before the Puerta del Sol in Madrid filled up with ‘Indignants’.

#24H is a trap. Recreating a day in the twenty-first century in a linear manner is a venture destined to frustrate anyone who attempts it (a trap) for time is a fragmented, deterritorialised, concave, and convex substance. A day on Youtube has 50 400 hours of videos. 2100 days fit into one day, and 70 months, into 24 hours. #24H has links, echoes of the past, tweets that circulate, exits, tunnels, readers who take refuge in parallel chats. The flow of the blog is a trap.

#24H is remixable. Any reader can deconstruct #24H, read it, write it, and rewrite it. The Creative Commons licence allows this. The author and the publisher believe in collective creation. The remix is desirable. #24H is a source code.

Jesús Rocamora (2012) classified in ten characteristics the innovating elements of this work, which we can use as a paradigm of the new forms of reading and of the new documentary territories in which the narrative hybridises with social networks: 15 May as a creative explosion, the code as a narrative language, the blog as a form, collective authorship versus the figure of the writer, the fake as a way of describing reality, a Trojan horse in the publishing industry, reader participation, the DJ culture applied to literature, fragmented reading for a fragmented time, piracy as an act of love.

The press release that the author himself sent to the media to present his work is a good summary of its philosophy:

Apart from the problems inherent to external advertisements for the contents, which are linked to the features of the device and the social practices of the user, the problem lies equally in the lack of overall perception of the informative space where the reader is, in such a way that on moving through the digital corpus he or she may lack specific information on the volume and organisation of the contents placed at his or her disposal. Any old book, a traditional encyclopaedia, or a shelf in a library indicate by their very physical presence the amount of information they are presumed to contain. In the case of an electronic work this is a purely abstract dimension. So that browsing can be carried out without a hitch spatial guidelines must exist that allow fluid movement within the informative space without losing direction. The reader has to internalise the structure of the informative space where he or she is, in short the operating methods of the programme or of the application, which as far as possible will coincide with the operating methods of the mind. The traditional reading model has been considerably altered by the lack of the mental representation of the structure of the document, which generates sense in itself. The reader who is familiar with traditional documents develops a whole series of perceptive hypotheses when consulting them, predicting up to a point the approximate place where he or she can find the information and using to do so a structural representation model unconsciously assimilated through habitual contact with these means. With electronic documents this checking becomes complicated given the physical lack of information available, the amount of which cannot be guessed in any way, which contributes towards the hindering of this factor of orientative recognition. In any case, as Gillaud emphasises, books have become genuine documentary fields equipped with a technical articulation that allows them to transform their linear nature into a new documentary dynamics.

The Gutenberg parenthesis

Many of the new characteristics of eBooks refer to the Gutenberg Parenthesis theory which was originally formulated by Professor Lars Ole Sauerberg of the Institute for Literature, Media and Cultural Studies of the University of Southern Denmark. Sauerberg and his working group launched The Gutenberg Parenthesis Research Forum. Its main points of view can be appreciated in Figure 1.2.

The theory is based on the affirmation that 500 years of printed text were no more than a mere parenthesis between the oral world of almost all of history prior to the invention of the printing press and the secondary orality that we are experiencing as from the invention of the Internet (Fioromonte, 2010).

This is not a new theory as it was already outlined by Marshall McLuhan in his books of the 1960s and 1970s, especially in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and had also been foreshadowed by Walter J. Ong in some of his works (Ong, 1982, 2002, 2005). Authors such as Thomas Pettitt have embraced and disseminated it on numerous occasions (Pettitt, 2011).

While printed culture is dominated by original, individual, independent, stable, and canonical compositions, pre-parenthesis culture had been dominated by the opposite traits. These are namely a re-creative, collective, contextual, unstable, and traditional performance, all terms that are likely to be merely another way of naming or relating to the sampling, remixing, loaning, redesigning, appropriation, and recontextualisation characteristic of the ‘post-parenthesis’ digital Internet culture.

Since the Renaissance the communication (transmission) of Western culture has been dominated/determined by mechanically produced texts. For Sauerberg, Pettitt and other authors, Gutenberg is no more than a parenthesis coming to an end.

The term ‘parenthesis’ is powerful and suggestive and clearly marks a before and an after, an in the middle and an after in time, revealing above all profound affinities and material and symbolic continuities between the before and the after, and relegating the medium (the core of Western culture) to a passing station, to a search for closure, or to a colonising attempt of the disruptive forms of orality that had been silenced, punished, and colonised in the same way as the authocthonous peoples hand in hand with a symbolic/predatory capitalism, the viral control agent of which was the printing press.

According to Piscitelli (2011) the printing press was always greeted as a wonderfully disruptive innovation that came to invent us as subjects and to create the modern world. However, this author wonders whether the printing press did not in fact play an emancipating role but was rather the Trojan horse through which the standardisation, automation, and above all the mechanisation of the conscience took place. What if the real emancipation was and continues to be orality?

The hypothesis of the parenthesis is certainly suggestive as are all rounded theories in figures or promises, all utopias or dystopias. A syllogism with false premises and an uncertain demonstration, like the theory of the second orality in which it is framed. If with Gutenberg the book had become a communication barrier that could only be enjoyed by a minority owing to the demand for intellective skills to complement those of mere oral communication, in the digital field these difficulties, far from being reduced, actually increase owing to the existence of more abundant intermediary technologies in continuous renovation, which forces recurrent digital literacy. It is no longer sufficient for the contemporary reader to possess skills inherent in reading; he or she has to be competent in the skills associated with the handling of social networks, computing, operating systems, programming, and those that may arise along the lines of those developed from an ever more complex structure despite usability advances. The logical and technological field in which the digital text unfolds also makes it obligatory to understand not only the structure of the content in order to make appropriate use of it but also the operative structure that allows it to develop. Any act of reading appeals to three clearly differentiated activities: handling, i.e. the basic modes of the appropriation of texts; comprehension, i.e. understanding of the content, and interpretation, i.e. the relationship between the text and its links to the cultural heritage of the reader. These activities are related to the three dimensions that Janet Murray and Jean Michel Salaün attribute to any medium: inscription, transmission, and representation, in the words of the former (Murray, 2011) and Lu, Vu, Su, according to the latter. Murray maintains that all things made of bits or computer codes lead to a single resource, a digital one with its original characteristics and determinants. On the other hand, conceiving any element in this new medium is the fruit of a wider collective effort that consists of building sense through the invention and the adaptation of the conventions of the resource. The expansion of the construction conventions that make up human culture also assumes the expansion of the capacity to understand the world and come into contact with others.

For Salaün (2010), whatever its format, a book has three inseparable dimensions, each of which is associated with a form of economics that prioritises one value above the others. However, he warns that the fact that one of the dimensions is favoured does not make the others disappear. These three dimensions are form, content or text, and medium.

Form is a dimension of an anthropological nature. It establishes the relationship of our body and our senses with the document, with the object, whatever the form of the medium, and it creates emotional links with it. In Murray’s conception it represents the inscription, which must be legible and decipherable. In the case of the printed book the object and the inscription are determined by the printing press; in the case of the eBook this dimension passes for a reading device, the form and presentation of which will vary depending on the reading terminal. Salaün comments that this dimension favours retrieval; the book, the document, must be seen in what is mainly a perceptive dimension. From a point of view of economics we are in the presence of an ordinary commodity, although it may assume the originality inherent to the economics of symbolic assets in which any element is a prototype.

The second dimension is of an intellectual nature. It questions the brain and its reasoning capacity in relation to the content of the document, with the text in itself, whatever the way in which it is represented. This coincides with Murray’s appreciation. The emphasis is placed on the text and on its sense and its meaning, regardless of its medium. It must be possible to read and comprehend the document.

The third dimension is of a social nature; it refers to our relationship with society and to the capacity of mediation and transmission, regardless of the form or the content. In the case of the printed book this condition passes for the act of reading which allows the interpreting by the reader of the information he or she is assimilating. The reader is transformed thanks to the intervention of the memory registered in the work. In the analogical context this capacity of transmission is limited in distance and over time, and the influence on the reader is negligible. In the case of eBooks, the intervention of social networks considerably modifies this interdependence of the book in a wider context, its socialisation. This last dimension appeals to the documentary function of the work, to the capacity that its content is assimilated by going beyond the restricted circle of spatial and temporary barriers.

Up to a point the theories of Murray and Salaün support the hypothesis of the Gutenberg Parenthesis, insofar as the extent to which form, content, and representation would have reincorporated discourse to the socially prevailing epistemic system courtesy of information technologies and their integration on the Internet. The printing press would have extracted this discourse from the pre-existing bibliographical circulation. As SalaünSalaün points out:

For her part Murray points out:

For his part François Bon (2011a) suggests that surely what we call an eBook is an inner projection that we make towards an object or a numerical object of our inherited idea, constituted by virtue of the real or fetishistic importance that we give to the printed book. Is not our reading of eBooks nothing more than a substitute for a practice that we have learnt and assimilated by means of the printed book?

The thing is that reading also includes other semiotic, psycho-cognitive, social, and interactive dimensions that transcend the mere transposition of mediums. Any type of book involves the existence of a principle and of referential and pragmatic properties linked to a medium, whether physical or otherwise, and its characteristics. On the other hand, the relationship between the reader and the document goes beyond its physical nature, as they are conditioned by the reading objectives, the provisions, the cognitive structures, and the forms of knowledge incorporated as an individual, which may vary considerably depending on the knowledge, the concerns, the interests, and the values of the readers. The reading process is definitively social yet at the same time individual. Access to the content of a text is not only determined by the reader’s subjectivity, but also by the medium in which the reading is carried out and by the circuit on which the text is inscribed as a means of communication. Form, content, readers, and readings will always be historically and socially conditioned.

Any experience of reading and communication is therefore conditioned by a production and interpretation context in any time and place, without it being possible to equate reading or communication experiences that are far apart in distance and in time. Each new technology encourages the emergence of new genres and new practices, the conventions of which take some time to stabilise by favouring appropriation and assimilation. When these conventions are transverse in nature, as is the case with the use of social networks, the process of incorporation and integration accelerates. Traditional publishing has developed a layout and a paratext that facilitate the retrieval of vital data. Parallel to the sequential and linear nature of the routes imposed by the medium, and the reading devices and those for retrieving traditional information, elements have been gradually incorporated such as indexes, tables, cross-references, etc., which have allowed random access to the contents. eBooks have increased this potential by favouring the documentary nature of the contents.

Regardless of whether these arguments are correct, what is indisputable is that the book has lost the central importance that it enjoyed during the printing-press era, that its effect is played down in the light of history, and that as a journalistic text recently pointed out: ‘That ape who dragged stones about for thousands of years invented fire 500,000 years ago and 10 seconds ago he invented the Internet, in which the words are part of the global nervous system. Until now we had only used 15% of our brain capacity, and from now on we have motorways and secondary roads with millions of lazy neurons jumping like bubbles; only our hands retain the memory of the stone axe.’ (Del Pozo, 2012)

New scenarios, new cultural territories

The book is a product that is universally recognisable and recognised and is very ancient; it is an integral part of the uses and customs of society, and has a perceived image that has gradually evolved.

In this process its frontiers, its defining profiles, and its symbolic representations have gradually been modified, overlapping with other cultural assets that are clearly differentiated in the beginning but subsequently show more similarities.

The book, as an object of cultural and informative contents, has never stood in isolation in plans of cultural activity and information, but has always been related to other objects and cultural assets and to the media as a whole. If this was so in the analogical era, relationships have hastened towards almost total integration in the digital era with the producing of synergies that assimilate, amplify, and fuse the roles that they used to play separately. Therefore, the interlinking of the book with other cultural assets has led to a gradual weakening of its frontiers. This juxtaposition of its frontier lines has created novel changing spaces in which the concept of the book has extended to other previously unexplored territories such as that of enriched works (Vooks) created by Simon and Schuster, or applications in which both container and content and software and semantic space occupy the same position.

From a system in which entry on the publishing circuit was restricted by the selection systems of originals, the programming of companies, or the whim, the instinct, and the intuition of literary or collection managers, we have passed to another in which the already weak entry barriers of the publishing sector seem to have definitively fallen to provide publication and editing systems in which the figure of the publishing house does not have the paramount importance that it has had for the last two centuries.

The activity of publishing has always been weakly capital-intensive and with inconsistent scale economies, both owing to the linguistic and cultural factor that erodes the product’s attractions abroad and to the ‘craftsmanship’ nature of the publishing process, which is based on the quality of the relationship between the author and the publisher to favour small and medium-sized companies.

It is this permeability that has encouraged a strong level of intrasectorial and extrasectorial transactions, with publishing houses being ideal targets for mergers and takeovers owing to a chronic sub-capitalisation that has encouraged the entry of external agents into the publishing business. Indeed, the groups that currently dominate (Amazon, Apple, Google) have originated in businesses that are either completely different or that are clearly differentiated from the core activity of publishing. It is for this reason that the vision of the book sector as a business dominated by artisans or old-fashioned businessmen now only corresponds to a small part of the book business. Publishing continues to be one of the essential elements of the communication industry; it is true that in many cases it has an almost ‘craftsmanship’ nature in which the supply is essentially created by small companies founded by book lovers, who being involved in something they are passionate about do not expect to achieve immediate financial profitability. This comforting image, which can easily be verified today, does not however correspond to that articulated by the breakthrough of communication and information technologies. In common with other communication sectors, for several years publishing has been subjected to major restructuring that has affected all links in the publishing chain.

Although it is not a new phenomenon, the concentration on publishing has gained unstoppable momentum in recent years. Both in Europe and in the USA groups of considerable size have appeared with high profitability that are capable of developing strategies that extend beyond natural boundaries. Concentration and internationalisation are the dominant movements. The importance and the magnitude of the groups involved in these operations, i.e. Google, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Apple, and Planeta, sketch a panorama of great changes in the publishing sector of all developed countries.

The future of the book and publishing consists of the adopting of practices, structures, and systems anchored in the Internet culture, and more specifically in the Web 2.0 culture, in which transparency, communication, and collaboration are instituted in nuclear work formulae. The concept of Agile Publishing is of this kind; by this process the computing term ‘Agile Software Development’ (Manifesto, 2011) is imported into the world of publishing. It is a procedure based on collaboration, on the integration of the client into the process of the elaboration of the product, on acceptance of the changes that may derive from this dialogue. The concept of agile publication rests on an analogy: the heart of the method contains a program, an application. But the objective of publication is a book that is meant to be read, independently of whether reading acquires an immersive, practical, recreational, or research nature. Publishing is intended to facilitate the act of reading. It is not a case of ergonomic or design matters, but rather matters of procedure. Agile publication ensures that the reader can obtain a response to the reading needs that may arise in its development, with a set of features that get ahead of and respond to any kind of manipulation in an intelligible and immediate manner. The proximity between the publisher and the development team is equivalent to that of the publisher and reader, and of the author and reader. The principles on which the APM (Agile Publishing Model) is based are as follows:

Experiments in which during his or her writing the author subjects the work to readers’ opinion are becoming more and more frequent; the suggestions they make may be acted upon at the author’s discretion. Readers do not actually co-write the book but they do take part in its development. Book Country, which we have mentioned above, is a good example of these practices, as is Rough Cuts ¹² by Safari in the academic field. In the Rough Cuts system the reader has access to ongoing manuscripts that have not yet been published but are available through Safari Books Online. Rough Cuts gives access to the latest information on a certain subject and gives the opportunity of interaction with the author before the definitive publication of the work. In the publishing field experiences can be found along these lines such as ‘Après le livre’ by François Bon, published by Publie.net, which allows reading by Streaming, downloading in pdf or epub, and access to the successive updates of the book after its publication. Another is ‘Books, a Futurist’s Manifesto’, by Hugh McGuire and Brian O’Leary, that has been mentioned above. This work was written and revised on PressBooks, an on-line production tool developed by McGuire that allows the incorporation of chapters and updates. Companies such as Zeen Social Books provide platforms for developing this kind of publication.¹³

It was precisely on the closing day of the 2012 Tools of Change Conference (TOC, #toccon) that Brett Sandusky (Macmillan New Ventures) moderated a round table on Real World Agile Publishing ¹⁴ featuring Dominique Raccah from Sourcebooks and Joe Wikert from O’Reilly Media. The conversation focused on the putting into practice of a model by the companies of both participants. Dominique Raccah locates the model within the framework of the Shift Age concept, which is contextualised by three phenomena that accelerate its need and development: the Flow to Global.

It is clear that the future lies on the screen, as the latter can recreate the consubstantial characteristics of e-literature: intertextuality in the sense of multiple shared creation, interactivity, and the juxtaposition of forms and means. Nowadays hundreds of millions of screens mark out our lives. Words have emigrated from paper to pixels, from atoms to bits. We are living in the era of the fourth screen. First came the cinema, then the television, then the computer, and finally Tablets, Smartphones, and any kind of device that allows reading and writing. This contrasts with earlier times that led to passivity; these screens encourage action, intervention, participation, and collaboration, which constitutes a radical difference and a significant qualitative leap. The invention of the printing press exponentially increased the available vocabulary from several thousands of words in the fifteenth century to one million today; it expanded audiences, made specialisation possible, and destroyed autoritas divina to secularise it and transfer it to the emerging figures of authors to make possible the appearance of the intellectual, of the person working with intelligence, the written word, and books. It also created the canon and dissidence thanks to greater publishing facilities and allowed the democratisation of culture through extensive networks of public libraries. The amount of reading time has tripled since the 1970s, when the first reading statistics began to be drawn up; there are several billion websites, blogs, wikis, etc., each of which has been designed and written by somebody.

Screens involve the mind but also the senses, in contrast to the generalised opinion that they are a one-way medium. Reading becomes holistic, as in the scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise immerses himself in a universe of data and dances inside it so as to obtain the required information. Mobile devices are beginning to capture our movements, such as Nintendo or Microsoft devices, and readers’ screens will soon capture the movement of our eyes to detect our interests, doubts, or needs, or will be sensitive to the indications of a movement to release enriched reality programmes. In the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), experiments are carried out with book prototypes projected on any flat surface by laser from storage devices that vary in size and capacity. And a screen that we can watch, that can watch us in its turn, and can detect the most confusing passages for us, those which attract our attention, and whether the reading bores us or amuses us. The text will be able to adapt to the reader and to the manner in which it is perceived. Although this may seem a futurist or unreal invention, it is being materialised in the digital world through smart reading devices such as bots (an abbreviation of robots) that operate in the Wikipedia. Bots are automated or semi-automated agents that interact with the Wikipedia when it is consulted by a user or to carry out the most repetitive and tedious tasks. Some bots, for example, specialise in the administration of interlinguistic links, in the resolving of homonyms, or in the persecution of acts of vandalism. Some bots work with categories: they add pages to a category, eliminate pages from a category, or move pages from one category to another. Others replace text chains in accordance with a regular expression, tools to correct spelling mistakes, or implement changes in Wikipedia syntaxis, or correct links to websites of disambiguation, etc.

Numerous robots exist to guide us in our on-line search for information; they establish our ‘reader profile’ and help us to protect our annotations and our recommendations. Robots that carry out an on-line prescriptive function that was formerly delegated to the family, teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary critics, etc., robots that index (Soccavo, 2012a). The book becomes involved with software and turns into software. It is not for nothing that one of its most innovating and ground-breaking manifestations is the work converted into an application, into an ‘app’, the book that is thought up and develops itself like a kind of engrossed art, involving all kinds of developments and multimedia features, the book that becomes a program and a metabook. Apps incorporate the Transmedia concept, i.e. the development of a content on various mediums by differentiating the content developed and the interaction capacities depending on the specificities of each medium. The Transmedia concept reaches its full development with app-books and constitutes an improvement on the previous Plurimedia and Crossmedia in which the mediums combine with the text to acquire a complementary rather than integrated nature.

As Robert Darnton (2009) points out, any attempt to explore the future while facing the problems of the present should be based on the study of the past. It becomes necessary to rethink the book concept, to consider its past, and to reconsider the reflections of Henri Jean Martin and Chartier on technological changes in order to understand the process in which we are immersed. The processes of technological change affect not only the medium but also the discourse as Cameron Leckie (2010) suggests, the metaphors that feed it, and its contextualisation. To return to Derrida, the disappearance of the book is also the birth of the book and the beginning of writing-reading.

Any change to any of the links in the chain determines the repositioning of the remainder. The self-publishing systems inherited from Vanity Publishers (Foucault’s Pendulum by Umbert Eco is unforgettable) have broken the ritual of publishing mediation, direct downloading from the publisher’s website or the platform with the inevitable distribution, permanent access with the intervention of the bookseller or librarian and the personalisation systems of the contents and the sociabilisation of reading with the isolation and independence of the latter regarding its sociological environment. E-publishing has not only encouraged the profitability of made-to-measure texts, of imaginative developments, of experimental and exploratory collections, of mixed formulae, of works subject to permanent revision and constant growth, but also the appearance of transparent reading in ever wider and increasingly shared environments, the appearance of what Bob Stein called Social Books. What is digital was initially unknown and marginal territory, a peripheral space, a terra incognita set aside for a handful of explorers. Now all uses lead to the Territory. The physical frontier has gradually become permeable, giving rise to an ever deeper and more frequent immersion in all things digital, and reading is no stranger to this phenomenon. On the contrary, immobilised by the nature of the medium in an isolated, immersive, and self-engrossed practice, it penetrates the vast territory of collaboration, intervention, and personalisation, the territory where socialisation achieves naturalisation papers, where reading becomes social.

History shows us how the evolution of the book and its concurrent products has served to expand the field of conscience, knowledge of the environment, and intellective capacity thanks to the intervention of technologies that are more and more open and collaborative. The book becomes part of a technologisation process that affects all human activities, among which thought takes pride of place. The concept we currently hold of the book and reading, as a result of the mediation of the digitalisation of the contents and the processes for its elaboration, is merely relative despite the force of the change and the modification of the preceding paradigm. The eBook allows us to develop new capacities, requires new skills of us, and establishes new productive structures and new business strategies, but in common with any other intellectual experience it is subject to the globalised technical acceleration that characterises our contemporaneity. We therefore know where we are now, but it is difficult to predict where we will be in the forthcoming years, in which perhaps what is digital as we currently conceive it will take the form of an ingenuous anecdote to the indulgent eyes of our descendants, such as steam machines or more recently the futurist hypotheses of Orwell, Asimov, and Clarke. The impressive thinking computer, Hal, of the last named that was magnificently recreated by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey today makes us smile even at its most threatening moments.

If the book is a place, as Bob Stein affirms, we should be talking about the places of knowledge and inserting it in the intellectual metaphor implied by all cultural mapping, a place between places, different from the places of Memory that had been characterised by Pierre Nora, as it is an entity that is permanently growing and undergoing a permanent process of change. A place of knowledge insofar as each one represents a process of the semantisation, socialisation, and appropiation of the world carried out by means of language, symbols, or specific action protocols by means of reading, whether individual or shared. Places that stand out in the printed medium and become dematerialised in the electronic field, becoming transformed as objects and intertextualising as contents, adapting to the changing environments that characterise a society in a permanent state of mutation.

In any case the book has been one of the human inventions that has most intensely set up a sacred space of its own, a hierophany, in which the individual and the collective and the intimate and the social come together. Perhaps the only sacred spaces that remain in the sense of the creation of a hermetic, timeless, and independent space are churches, cinemas, and libraries, which embody a liturgy that takes on the power of immanence that is hard to avoid for new initiates who accept their rituals with the meekness of the convert. The iconographical canon of the book has managed to introduce its impression into all the intellectual manifestations of last century, in which no interview, recording, biographical sketch, or article is not seen through a motley bibliographical gauze. This sense of religiosity has been based on a sophism that equates culture with the reading of books, and on the presumption that the 500 years of the printing press can be interpreted as a closed, complete, and finished period. The sacralisation of the book lies in the origin of the development of the printing press, when its expansion is linked to a religion that imposes its presence as a liturgical requirement, but also in the social acceptance of its image as a hypostasis of modernity, progress, and intelligence. This coexistence underlies the learned interpretations that understand reading as the reading of books. The book is one of the most powerful symbolic metaphors of the last two centuries. Fijalkow (1989) shows that the parents of schoolchildren from the lowest income families and who are uneducated were those most interested in their children’s dominating reading skills. Along the same lines, François de Singly (1993) affirms that in the case of readers with no family reading tradition:

With the passage of time it is possible that the Gutenberg parenthesis becomes the Gutenberg mirage when real data are obtained of readership in the printed field and they can be contrasted with new forms of consumption.

In 1928 Walter Benjamin (1987) spoke of the ‘pretentious universal gesture of the book’ to criticise the pre-eminent place that it occupied in the concert of the media, its central role among the communicative proposals that were to orientate literary efficiency, which considered that it should arise from the rigorous exchange between action and writing. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Roger Chartier manifested the ever greater difficulty of perceiving the book as a coherent, singular, and original work. The thing is that the concept of unstability and even of chaos is setting itself up as an emerging characteristic of the new mediums and therefore of the reading of the same. This ambivalent dimension in the conception of the contemporary book will prevail during the emerging period in which we find ourselves, in which as Gramsci said to characterise the transition periods of revolutions, what is new is not fully born and what is old is not quite dead. The result is a dialectic tension in which there is no clearly identifiable delimitation of pronouncements and positions. Eclecticism, intersection, and the search for connections constitute the evidence of thought and of resistance practices that will yield with time, carried out by the inertia of the digital movement, which as in Kandinsky’s triangle is on the way to changing from the minority pinnacle to the social base. This double meaning can be clearly appreciated in one of Lorenzo Soccavo’s (2012b) last articles in which he considers, echoing the theories of Nicholas Carr, whether with the Internet we are not losing the reading habit, and whether the drift from the digital market does not bring with it a reading commercialisation strategy. These are interesting questions that point to the nature and condition of a practice that is changing not only because of the sociological condition of new readers, digital natives accustomed to using intermediation technologies during any leisure or work activity, but owing to the existence of technological proposals that implicitly contain the possibilities of the expansion of reading and of the field of perception.

As Leckie (2010) affirms, all technologies increase the complexity of the organisation/society adopting them. Leckie describes four stages in a general case on the process of technological abandonment that are applicable to the digital environment.

During the early abandonment stage, the reasons for adopting the new technology are individual: altruism, frugality, professional needs, or image.

In this stage the sales of the new technology do not yet have a disruptive impact on industrial production based on the old one. This is the situation of most European Union countries in which eBook sales account for about 1% of the overall market, and which the United States abandoned with approximate percentages of 20% that are tending to rise.

The stage of economic abandonment tends to coincide with a financial crisis or an economic recession, when unemployment, wage cuts, and the increase in the cost of living are intense enough to erode not only optional expenses but also the consumption of essential articles. In the case of the book the difference in price between printed books and eBooks is a clear example of this stage, in which many buyers end up adopting the new model for purely economic reasons, although they are still strongly attached to the printed model. The large number of works that exist in the public domain, the offering of works at reduced prices, and the gradual fall in the prices of reading devices has encouraged the introduction of this stage, in which the economic and quantitative argument may lead to another type of argument, more ideological and qualitative. The essence of the dialectic law of the transfer from quantitative to qualitative changes is that the traits of quantity and quality are inherent to all objects and phenomena. Quantity and amount are linked to each other, with gradual and imperceptible quantitative changes giving way in the development process to radical qualitative changes. This step is taken in the form of a leap. What can be emphasised from this process is that once a qualitative change has been established it again generates quantitative changes, which in the case of the digital model implies the expansion of market niches.

In economic abandonment concomitant cases acquire particular importance as fuses of the main phenomenon, which in the case of the book are constituted by the gratuitousness of documentary types that have opened up the way to a perception of the exchange that differs from printed economic logic. We are mainly referring to the press, the migration of which to the electronic environment has been carried out under the imprint of gratuitousness, to the appearance of free-access communication forms, such as blogs, wikis, web portals, the personal websites of authors, etc. and the development of the open access philosophy itself generates a different mentality and attitude to reading by both authors and readers.

According to Ontanaya (2010) these processes involve considerable changes to publishing systems and to the expectations as to their continuity that new technologies imply. This author maintains that as long as low-consumption reflective colour screens suitable for multimedia are not consolidated traditional publishers have nothing to fear. The current crisis would not lead to a rapid economic abandonment if there were not an ideal product to which to make the transition. On the other hand however, Ontanaya points out that it will take time for the crisis to pass and that the pressure will continue to rise as technology and the production of raw materials improve.

It is also possible however for economic abandonment to occur earlier than expected, even only having electronic ink in devices and not economic Tablets. If the digital eBook is cheap enough despite the fact that it only serves a small proportion of the need for culture, the consumer may adapt his or her interest so as to make use of this opportunity. In other words, what might be a technological delay can become a cultural trait to favour the book compared with other contents that are more demanding as far as technology is concerned. This process can only occur if a series of simultaneous complementaries are articulated between organisational innovations, production methods, consumption and market innovations, infrastructures, education and training, and literacy in the new paradigm. Economic abandonment implies granting facilities in the application of the new technology, the existence of sufficient supply and accessible channels, a growing demand, and a reduction in the unitary production cost of the new formats that allow competing in the field of the internal economy of information.

The stage of systemic abandonment occurs when the old technology lacks incentives backed by demand and cannot be maintained. The chain of value begins to weaken in all its links, the major printers do not produce enough to keep their machines active, physical bookshops begin to disappear owing to their inability to adapt to the new reading and purchase practices, storage and distribution costs overload the budgets of publishing houses without their being justified by sales, and readers begin to relegate printed matter in favour of digital matter when the two alternatives exist, or they directly seek the digital medium.

The fourth stage is that of the slow abandonment of persistent cases. Old technology is only used in some very specialised segments in which there is interest in the contents, but especially in the container. This is the case of artistic books, of limited editions for bibliophiles, of book-objects, of typographical divertimentos, of works of poetry or painting that plays with the printed medium to create illusions or sensations of all kinds, etc. Printed copies become residual, something to be stored like old vinyl records, like museum exhibits, but rarely used. Their conservation is however ensured, as national book catalogue number legislation preserves them from abandonment. On occasion this abandonment may cause a rebound effect that allows the momentary resurgence of the old technology owing to the attraction of its rarity or the threat of its disappearance. This has been the case of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which after 244 years ceased publication of its printed edition of 32 volumes in March 2012. The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 2010 was the last printed version available to the public, of which 4000 sets are still available. In 1990, only 22 years before, over 120 000 sets of the printed version had been sold. Shortly after the disappearance of the printed version was announced, its sales increased considerably. On other occasions it is not the collector effect that boosts the upturn but the price reduction that makes the article of interest once more. However, what this consumption rebound does is to saturate and rapidly collapse what remains of line production, and the collapse of production will have forced the transition of other readers to the digital book.

These stages are not chronological and linear in nature but are supermimposed on each other according to the evolution of the markets in each country due to the circumstances of different rhythms and manifestations in the various countries. For example, in the last two years the United Kingdom has seen a marked acceleration of the eBook market with rises of some 250% compared to previous periods. The eBook market stands at about 6% with a tendency to increase to 13%. In Italy however, the main publishing group for press and books, Mondadori, has seen its book sales fall some 50% in 2012, while in the electronic division the overall figure for 2011 has been surpassed by that of the first quarter of 2012.

Leckie’s theories are not new. Creative destruction in the economy is a concept devised by the German sociologist Werner Sombart and popularised by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942). Using this term he describes the innovation process that takes place in a market economy in which new products destroy old companies and business models. For Schumpeter, the innovations of entrepreneurs are the force behind economic growth sustained in the long term, despite the fact that they may destroy the value of well established companies along the way.

The activist and political philosopher Mijaíl Bakunin also maintained, albeit in generic terms, that the destructive force of the old is the force that creates the new: ‘passion for destruction is a creative passion’.

The publishing industry has undergone a profound transformation over the last decade. Technological changes have encouraged new models of the publication, distribution, and marketing of books, together with new ways of reading and sharing what is being read, new forms of creation and new ways of thinking.

Conclusion

To conclude, Table 1.1 gives a summary of the two attitudes and systems analysed in this chapter.

Reading and publishing face great challenges that according to Thompson (2012) can be set out as follows: