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Category: e-books

On Living Books by Janneke Adema

On Living Books by Janneke Adema

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Janneke Adema considers the contemporary scholarly book and how it could transition from a fixed, bound object to a more fluid and evolving entity. She argues that humanities scholars should reconsider their role as authors and strive to engage with knowledge production in more open, critical, and experimental ways. Adema challenges new media scholars (such as Lev Manovich and John Bryant) and print historians (such as Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns) for their perpetuation of the book as an unchangeable,…

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On “Back to the Future,” by Bob Stein

On “Back to the Future,” by Bob Stein

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In “Back to the Future,” Bob Stein discusses SocialBook, an Institute for the Future of the Book project that uses networked technologies to publish and read cultural materials. He argues that prior to the invention of the printing press, reading used to be a collaborative activity in social knowledge creation. People would gather around texts, discuss them, and insert comments into manuscripts via marginalia. Once book production became mechanized, and more people developed literacy skills, reading became a much more…

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On “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

On “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” by Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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In “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts,” Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggests that electronic publishing should reproduce the organization and structure of the print book, rather than take a skuemorphic approach that mimics the look of the book, and instead of employing more radical, disorienting approaches. To do so, Fitzpatrick offers Commentpress as a potential option, a WordPress theme that allows for side-by-side commenting on academic texts. She argues that by using a platform like Commentpress, one can return to…

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On “Traversing the Book of MPub: An Agile, Web-first Publishing Model,” by John Maxwell and Kathleen Fraser

On “Traversing the Book of MPub: An Agile, Web-first Publishing Model,” by John Maxwell and Kathleen Fraser

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John Maxwell and Kathleen Fraser propose that publishing should start on the web in their article “Traversing the Book of MPub: An Agile, Web-first Publishing Model,” published in the Journal of Electronic Publishing. They suggest that contemporary publishing is mainly born digital anyways — rarely does an author write on paper, then undergo a publication process dedicated to preserving the printedness of the written piece. Rather, most authors create digital artifacts, and publishers subject these artifacts to automated, desktop, and…

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On “The Object and the Process; or, Take This Book and Click It!” by Darcy Cullen

On “The Object and the Process; or, Take This Book and Click It!” by Darcy Cullen

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E-books have been a game changer for scholarly communications, and academic publishers have, perhaps, been the most affected by their development and popularity. In “The Object and the Process; or, Take This Book and Click It!,” UBC Press acquisitions editor Darcy Cullen explores how book production has been affected by the digital turn. Although she suggests that e-book uptake was slow at first, it has now reached an undeniable degree of prevalence and can no longer be ignored. E-books offer…

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On “Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read,” by Alexandra Alter and Karl Russell

On “Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read,” by Alexandra Alter and Karl Russell

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In the short New York Times article, “Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read,” Alexandra Alter and Karl Russell examine Jellybooks, an analytics company that specializes in tracking reader behaviour with e-books. The big e-book retailers like Amazon already use this sort of technology in their e-readers, Alter and Russell explain. Publishers without their own specific e-readers have, until now, not been able to compete with this sort of data-driven marketing. Through consensual reading trials, Jellybooks…

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On “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographic Imagination,” by Alan Galey

On “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographic Imagination,” by Alan Galey

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In “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographic Imagination,” Alan Galey performs a bibliographic study of The Sentamentalists by Johanna Skibsbrud, from its first, small press print publication to its Kobo e-book version to its post-Giller prize larger print run. Galey argues that it is still possible — even necessary — to study the materiality of e-books like the Kobo version of The Sentamentalists as a book historian. To do so, Galey argues, requires a combination of traditional bibliographic skills…

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On “E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better,” by John Maxwell

On “E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better,” by John Maxwell

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John Maxwell takes issue with the current state of e-books in “E-Book Logic: We Can Do Better”– or, more precisely, with the e-book market. He argues that e-books are touted as being new (as of 2013) but that the electronic book, or at least electronic-facilitated writing, has a decades-long history. What is new, Maxwell suggests, is that large corporations (cough *Amazon* cough) are inventively controlling how consumers interact with digital media versus other consumer goods. In this article, Maxwell aims…

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