Navigation is not trivial

As Markku Eskelinen put it, times change.

The word digital, he says, doesn't carry much descriptive weight any more, as almost every aspect of our culture is more or less digital. In such a situation digital theorists are or could be migrating or even sucked back to their old disciplines that are more than willing to have their fair share of "new media". And then the crucial question becomes how to negotiate and renegotiate the relationships between these two literatures (ergodic literature and non-ergodic): in what terms and in whose. It's also a question of autonomy and authority and there's more to it than the inevitable changes in triviality, although [Eskalinen] has to admit that when teaching cybertext theory nowadays in Finland, the hardest part is always to convince students that navigation is non-trivial.

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Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Reasons for browsing Chrome

Music to the ears of bloggers and web designers well versed in SEO is how much a well done and subtle SEO blog or site will improve in Chrome.

The beauty of Chrome’s combination of user interface, semantic web and SEO is that it will remember any SEO and semantic worthy site for the user if the browser works as it is intended. That means Google will reward people who use SEO correctly, subtly and well.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Readers at the digital age

Embracing the Digital Age: An Opportunity for Booksellers and the Book Trade ISBN 9780955223365 http://www.booksellers.org.uk/DOC/index.asp



Brave New WorldDigitisation of Content: the opportunities for booksellers and The Booksellers AssociationThese publication was digitally printed by Lightning Source and is available on demand through booksellers. This publication is also digitally available for download from http://www.booksellers.org.uk/



« Digital publications redux »http://info.texterity.com/info/reader-research/Source : Seybold report, 07/2008“For digital editions, desktop and laptop computers are still favored (74% and 61%, respectively). E-book readers barely registered.”
French reports (PDF format ),
Source : http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/index-rapports.htm
juin 2008Rapport sur le livre numériqueRemise du rapport de Bruno Patino à Christine Albanel le 30 juin 2008

Voir le compte rendu dans « Le Monde des Livres » du 4 juillet 2008 à l’adresse http://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2008/07/03/a-l-heure-de-la-galaxie-numerique_1065767_3260.html
janvier 2008Rapport du médiateur de l'édition publique pour l'année 2006Rapport du médiateur de l'édition publique pour l'année 2005
septembre 2007Remise du rapport de la Mission de réflexion sur la Librairie indépendanteLa situation économique de la librairie indépendante



Other references


http://www.metabole.typepad.com/
http://lafeuille.homo-numericus.net/2008/07/projet-de-planete-sur-ledition-electronique.html http://www.netvibes.com/biblio21#Actu_Ebook http://blog.feedbooks.com/fr/
http://www.hypertextual.net/

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Wireless reading device

1993 Digital printing permits books to be typeset and published faster than ever, paving the way for print-on-demand publishing.

1994 Jeff Bezos launches online bookstore Amazon.com, which revolutionises bookselling and rapidly dominates global book sales.

2004 Google undertakes a project to digitise millions of books from the New York Public Library and the libraries of four major universities. Complete text of books out of copyright and partial text of books still in copyright are made available online.

2007 Amazon launches the Kindle, a wireless reading device that can download ebooks, newspapers and magazines.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Capitalism ready to move on e-books ?

If there is a profit to be made from literary texts, then this is what we will see (at a price).

What seems less likely to occur is the digitisation of the mass of printed texts currently stored in libraries. Considering only the literary field, we now have available a number of the canonical literary texts (especially in French and English) in electronic form, but these are for the most part not annotated as they are in scholarly printed editions, which makes them less immediately useful for readers. More important, there is a vast amount of other literature and a body of critical material which remains in print form. Little of this will be digitised for the simple reason that there is little profit to be made from the scholarly environments in which it is read.

Digitisation is not cheap. During a project David S. Miall managed several years ago to digitise a number of texts (from the Romantic period), the average cost of producing a reliable, proof-read electronic edition of a novel was about $4000. Consider the book and journal collections in all the other disciplines that a library holds: only a minute fraction of this material will ever be digitised.

(from D.S.Miall)

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Universal computer

The theory of digital physics is that there exists a program for a universal computer which computes the dynamic evolution of our world.

For example, the computer could be a huge cellular automaton, as suggested by Zuse (1967), or a universal Turing machine, as suggested by Schmidhuber (1997), who pointed out that there is a very short program that computes all possible computable universes in an asymptotically optimal way.

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Sweeping change

J. Hillis Miller does point out that Derrida's Glas and the personal computer appeared at more or less the same time.

Both work self-consciously and deliberately to make obsolete the traditional codex linear book and to replace it with the new multilinear multimedia hypertext that is rapidly becoming the characteristic mode of expression both in culture and in the study of cultural forms. The `triumph of theory' in literary studies and their transformation by the digital revolution are aspects of the same sweeping change" (Literary Theory). This sweeping change has many components, to be sure, but one theme appears in both writings on hypertext (and the memex) and in contemporary critical theory -- the limitations of print culture, the culture of the book.

Bush and Barthes, Nelson and Derrida, like all theorists of these perhaps unexpectedly intertwined subjects, begin with the desire to enable us to escape the confinements of print. This common project requires that one first recognize the enormous power of the book, for only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves free from some of its limitations.

George P. Landow

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Parodying

Circulation dynamic of texts published on the Internet resembles the medieval and Renaissance practice of glossing, parodying, or otherwise altering a manuscript before passing it along.

Slowly, though, the fixity and ubiquity of print have unfortunately eradicated such practices, all but banishing the notion of a collaborative, textually permeable work. Now, the cult of the author and the printing press are still inextricably linked; you can't have one without the other. By chance, digital text, however, requires neither.

As a consequence, and much to the chagrin of political critics, no economic model has yet been devised to explain its production and propagation in a capitalist society.

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Enter Hypertextual as a member

Alternumerics by Paul Chan

Alternumerics explores the intimate relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we type and what we mean.

By replacing the individual letters and numbers (known as alphanumerics) with textual and graphic fragments that signify what is typed in radically different ways, Alternumerics transforms the act of typing into a digital performance and any computer connected to a standard printer into an interactive artmaking installation.