How to teach your edition how to swim

The mutability of electronic editions confronts editors with a new world, in which large parts of current editorial theory must be re-thought, based as it often is on assumptions based on the properties of paper editions. Software can adapt more easily than paper to the needs and interests of the reader, which means many choices about the selection of information in an edition and its presentation to the reader no longer need to be fixed for all time, but can be left open for the reader. Software also tends to have a very short lifetime compared to paper; in order to remain usable for more than a few years, electronic editions must find ways of representing the essential information of the edition in software-independent, non-proprietary ways.