Geert Lovink introduced this title panel of the conference by mainframing its attempt at Nietzchean thinking around the binding and unbinding of the book – not in terms of ethics or morality, beyond the book as a sentimental object, and more in terms of the exploded situation of the present.

Researcher and theorist Florian Cramer, currently, Centre for Creative Professions at Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam, threw up a series of very concrete genealogical provocations. Cramer came to new media as a classically trained philologist, precisely through interest in the situation of electronic literature 20 years ago, the 91 launch of electronic book applications such as Voyager and so on. The Unbound Book’s title panel evokes for him a troublingly “strong sense of deja vu”. Considering all the experimentation with multimedia writing in the 80s and early 90s that happened before net art and multimedia design, and that has now “completely stagnated” in the hands of its same early agents, Cramer asked provocatively about the elided techno-cultural links here: what does the history of artistic experimentation (indeed early electronic or not) have to do with this apparent present (nostalgic? or ahistoric?) conversation around unboundedness?

Florian Cramer @ the unbound book conference – photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

David Stairs’ Boundless (1983) provides an important theoretical reference point, being emblematic of the dialectic that Cramer emphasises is always at issue:

“Binding and unbinding exist in it in a fruitful paradox, a tension that nevertheless boils down to binding as the lowest common denominator of a book. A book, in other words, is almost anything bound together, or unbound in negative reference to the former. To be unbound, after all, does not mean to be boundless.” Further, there are important spatial dimensions of being bound, alongside the temporal: bound “so that it doesn’t fall apart”, and bound in the sense of enduring coherently. For Cramer, “the idea of the book is one that can be read in 1, 5, and 100 years time.” Exceptions presented by unstable books (citing here Dieter Roth and Jan Voss‘s work, available from Amsterdam’s Bookie Woekie), only prove the rule. Yet this strong dialectical appreciation of bound/unbound “bookness” seems absent from the panel description which seems to incorrigibly describe the web rather than the book. If it were really a book, “links would be broken, social tags spammed, geo-location programming interfaces would have changed, the codecs for the video and sound … obsolete, and it wouldn’t work on your screen in 2021 anyway.”

Cramer’s point is that this is exactly what happened with electronic literature 20 years ago, carrying itself on the “exact same slogans”: “linking, multimedia, interactivity, networking.” The Expanded Books series launched by Bob Stein’s Voyager company, an apple-specific project inspired by the Powerbook in 91, is the near-same event as the ipad inspiring “unbound” literary experiments and ereading start-ups today. They are even ‘unbinding’ exactly the same texts! Noting the John Cage reference, Cramer sees that we’re almost literally revisiting George Landow’s hypertext media theory:

We must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multi-linearity, modes, links, and networks. Almost all parties to this paradigm shift, which marks a revolution in human thought, see electronic writing as a direct response to the strengths and weaknesses of the printed book. (Landow, Hypertext, 1992).

Similar enthusiasm surrounded the audiovisual media/theory of the early 90s, but film and games have stayed separate for the most part, and “it’s the same with books and the web.” Of course ebook culture has emerged, but it is embodied instead by two “commercial and anti-commercial extremes, Amazon’s Kindle e-book store and aaaarg.org… the text-cultural equivalent of iTunes and mp3 file sharing respectively.” The actual historical passage of digital music and audio is strikingly similar to the present situation of the book: “people simply shared and collected simple audio files”, just as we today sample “plain vanilla PDFs, ascii and epub files.” So in fact the book’s trajectory is: “premedieval scroll, bounded codex, computer file.” Cramer predicts: “Hardly anyone will buy interactive mulitmedia books, just as they didn’t in the 1990s.” The book becomes merely solidified by the contrary nature of the web.

From a history of artistic experimentation around the book we can be sure of this, as Drucker’s work shows.

Even in their most experimental and unstable forms, books do not leave beyond their material unity or binding. They are persistently “thought of as a whole… an entity, to be reckoned with in (their) entirety” (Drucker, 122). This is not a conservative statement, Cramer emphasies. Even classical examples of “unbound” literary books such as Marc Saporta’s Composition no. 1, Raymond Queneau’s One hundred thousand billion poems, indeed “explode the corpus,” but do so by evoking it “ex negativo.” The binding here becomes only more accentuated.

Its interesting at this point to observe that Drucker’s definition of “artist books,” the continuity of their experimentalism, coincides almost directly with present technical definitions of epublications. This is Drucker:

To remain artist’s books, rather than book-like objects or sculptural works with a book reference to them, these works have to maintain a connection to the idea of the book, to its basic form and function as the presentation of material in relation to a fixed sequence which provides access to its contents (or ideas) through some stable arrangement. Such a definition stretches elastically to reach around books which are card stacks, books which are solid pieces of bound material, and other books whose nature defies easy characterisation.

Meanwhile Cramer adumbrates more recent epub specifications in the following way:

Epublications are not limited to linear content… but the basic assumption is there is an order that is not achievable through html alone. A key concept of epublication is as multiple resources that may be consumed in a specific order. They are in essence offline media, self-contained documents with downloading features.

From this point of coincidence though, the technical, political, and aesthetic possibilities of epub experimentation is much more difficult than what the present discourses of unboundedness suggest. Cramer gives the example of the Boem Paukeslag project produced at Piet Zwarte, an effort to publish a visual poem as animation on an ereader, using entirely non-standardized code. This was only possible through extreme amounts of crude technical hacking, with the result restricted to reading on this single hacked device. The gesture of the work is this exercise of difficult possibility in the era of ereading.

Cramer ended by ruminating on the increased interest in and mainstreaming of artist books today, as a “genre of graphic design.” Print itself here seems to be becoming a “boutique niche of materiality.” This is its entropy: “all print books strive to become coffee table books, often with warm, fuzzy and unbound characteristics”. The artist book becomes a real or auratic object, and tech art schools become implicated in “producing boutique collectiables for rich people,” not unlike vinyl collection. The image of the young Nick Carraway in the Great Gatsby, enamoured by the great library at the houseparty of the Long Island bourgoise, and picking up up a book from a shelf only to realise that not one on the shelf had been read, seems to resonate even more strongly in the present. Electronic books in contrast are the cheap paperback books of our time, for better and for worse.

PDF of presentation available here: Unbound Book.

The fourth speaker of ‘The Unbound Book’ session is Bob Stein. Stein has been engaged with electronic publishing full time since 1980. He has been involved in many projects, like Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Voyager Company, Intellectual Tools of the Future, and the Institute for the Future of the Book. Currently Stein and his partners are building a comprehensive platform for social reading called SocialBooks.

First, he starts his presentation with answering some questions moderator Geert Lovink asked at the start of the session. He is very clear and short in his answers: “Do we herald the death of the individual author with the rise of collaborative writing?” “Yes”

Bob Stein @ the unbound book conference - photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

In 1992 Voyager Company published the first electronic books, including Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. With the rise of electronic books, he found it hard to have a clear definition of books: ‘We don’t have the words yet, it may take some years to make a good definition of books.’ In addition, he continues with a short overview of the definition of books in the last few decades. Stein starts in 1979 with the use of multi media. He shows a small video of a man with one of the first computers. On this computer the man has a kind of early version of an e-book: when he touches the screen, matching words appear. In 1981 the projects Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Intellectual Tools of the Future were started. He figured that we had to stop thinking about the physicality of the book, and start thinking about how books are used. It is more about the experience of reading than the material. From that moment on, Stein started calling books ‘user-driven media’. This is in contrast with 20th century media, which is producer-driven media and where ‘things just happen to you’. User-driven media is replacing this, and consequently the way we use media has changed. We treat media the way we read books: not random but linear.

Continually, in 1996 the web came along and the container definition of books suddenly disappeared. The urgency to define books again becomes more clear. In 2006, Network Books appeared. The first version was Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark. Wark writes in paragraphs; this made it possible to present the book online as cards. Instead of placing comment space underneath the text, the comments were placed next to the cards. This small change was actually a very profound change. At first, McKenzie replied to every comment, but after a while he became comfortable with it and eventually he trusted the conversation as a whole. The hierarchy of print suddenly seemed a lot flatter when feedback and comments of readers were included. In 2008 The Golden Notebook was created. This is one of the variants of Game Theory by McKenzie. Next to this text there were comments of seven women. They haven’t met before the project, but that did not matter: a social layer was created.

Consequently Bob Stein states that a book is a place: a place where readers and sometimes authors congregate. This influences the way authors work: old fashion authors engage in a subject matter for future readers, new school authors engage with readers on particular subjects. Stein explains: ‘Suppose you write a piece, for example a biography of Obama, but instead of publishing it at once, you publish several parts every once in a while. Readers can pay a small amount of money for every post, instead of a larger amount for the complete work. This is more like MySpace or blogging, so it could be more natural for young researchers.’ Sounds like a good idea to me.

Stein continues with his project SocialBook.com. This is an online platform for social reading. With SocialBooks, he wants to build an ecosystem for publishing that assumes that books are places where people gather. Works will appear in the Browser, not in mobile apps or proprietary non browsers based readers. This is made possible with HTML5.

Moreover, he names four flavours of social reading. First, having conversations with people you know in the margin of the book. Second, having access to others’ comments in the book. Users can comment on the text, bring quotes forward that are highlighted, post comments to the group, tweet and Facebook it. They can also make comments to other readers of the same book, and can see a list of all the comments of all the readers of a certain page. In other words, the user can interact with the text. Third, reading and extracting comments and reading other people’s critiques. Social means being able to read an experts gloss on a book. For example, someone can extract their comments and export them. Stein explains: ‘think how important it is going to be when you have a guide through a book. In this case, when you get to a page that is interesting, you are in the book. ’Fourth, engage with authors asynchronously or in in real time “in the book”. There are lots of options of hiring authors or inviting them to your group. You can think of the relation between authors and readers differently. For example, some people would be willing to pay a small amount of money to ask questions to the author via SocialBook, or to have a tutor on math books.

To illustrate the four flavours, Stein shows us a small demonstration of SocialBooks. On stage he selects a part of a text and comments on it. A colleague in the back of the conference room responses with a comment: a successful experiment. Unfortunately, Stein could not spend a lot of time in examining reading and writing subjects. However, he thinks it will take a while before the boundary between reading and writing will disappear. By that, he is not thinking about two or three years, but more like a few decades.

Last, some questions were asked by the audience:

‘Could you turn the social layer off?’
‘Yes you can. But I think the value is in the social layer, perhaps the book should be free, and users have to pay for this social layer.’

‘Can you turn the book layer off?’
‘I do not think that is relevant since all the comments are about the book. Only when you know the text by heart, like a short poem, it could be possible but not with a book or essay. However, I think that the discussion is the most interesting part, like the discussion on Wikipedia. This is where the action happens. But SocialBooks in concerned with the fixed text.’