Important piece by Johanna Drucker in the latest Los Angeles Review of Books

“The stumpers for innovation like to describe books as “linear” and argue that analog formats constrain the reader. Since the days of the CD-ROM and hypertext, we’ve been sold, as a great advantage of the digital, an explosion of the design constraints of the conventional book. The problem with this story is that it is historically wrong and theoretically misguided. Texts were never linear; their structures of repetition and refrain create meaning that builds across the temporal and spatial unfolding in their composition. What seems like the strict linearity of the physical book — or of the unrolling scroll of antiquity — should not obscure the multivalent properties of a text. The Song of Songs, the Bhagavad Gita, Gilgamesh, and theIliad are hardly linear. Their poetical and philosophical complexity is structured into their language, not their letter-by-letter sequence. The invention of the codex in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era brought a random-access device into active use, and the spatial as well as temporal dimensions of the form make for multiple paths and points of entry. The medieval European codex was a complex apparatus specifically engineered to support discontinuous reading, not linear in the least.”