John Updike read Kevin Kelly's article, Scan This Book! in last week's NYT [go here for background] and reacted vehemently: "Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of "information" on the Web, he said, "books traditionally have edges." But "the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets. So, booksellers," he concluded, "defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity."
And, as if by faerie-majick If:book answered by launching GAM3R 7H30RY - a book with no edges. Rejoice as your unique human identity snaps in two like a pencil!
The possibilities that GAM3R 7H30RY opens for us historians - translations/recensions/commentaries interspersed and commingled; languages bleed in and out of text pages; layers conceal and reveal. More, much much more, soon. Go see the book, in the meantime.
And at that point I begin to realise how utterly symbiotic the accreditation of institutional capital and an unnervingly narrow channel of formal possibilities for the presentation of historical work have become. That sentence is badly written and I'm too fuzzy to figure out what I mean by that, so I hope you catch my drift.