{"id":2196,"date":"2014-01-17T21:06:29","date_gmt":"2014-01-18T02:06:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/?p=2196"},"modified":"2015-01-05T13:53:05","modified_gmt":"2015-01-05T18:53:05","slug":"pixel-dust-illusions-of-innovation-in-scholarly-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2014\/01\/17\/pixel-dust-illusions-of-innovation-in-scholarly-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Pixel Dust: Illusions of Innovation in Scholarly Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/lareviewofbooks.org\/essay\/pixel-dust-illusions-innovation-scholarly-publishing\/#.UtkzAmnFDPY.twitter\">Important piece<\/a> by Johanna Drucker\u00a0in the latest Los Angeles Review of Books<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The stumpers for innovation like to describe books as \u201clinear\u201d and argue that analog formats constrain the reader. Since the days of the CD-ROM and hypertext, we\u2019ve 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 \u2014 or of the unrolling scroll of antiquity \u2014 should not obscure the multivalent properties of a text. The<i>\u00a0Song of Songs<\/i>,<i>\u00a0<\/i>the\u00a0<i>Bhagavad Gita<\/i>,\u00a0<i>Gilgamesh<\/i>, and the<i>Iliad<\/i>\u00a0are 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.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Important piece by Johanna Drucker\u00a0in the latest Los Angeles Review of Books &#8220;The stumpers for innovation like to describe books as \u201clinear\u201d and argue that analog formats constrain the reader. Since the days of the CD-ROM and hypertext, we\u2019ve been sold, as a great advantage of the digital, an explosion of the design constraints of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2198,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions\/2198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}