The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E‐Space

The brief career of the "e-book" has been plagued with fits and starts. In the twentysome years since desk-top computers, palms, hand-helds, pods, and other devices have come into widespread use, a whole host of surrogates for traditional books have been trotted out with great fanfare and high expectations. In almost every case, these novelties are accompanied by comparisons between familiar forms and their reinvented shape in an electronic context. That legacy can be traced in nearly every descriptive title: the expanded book, the super-book, the hyper-book, or, "the book emulator" — my personal favorite for its touching, underdog, sensibility. Such nomenclature seems charged by a need to acknowledge the historical priority of books and to invoke a link between their established cultural identity and the new electronic surrogates.