Books in bytes? Not yet

Academe, Sep/Oct 1999 by Givler, Peter

Electronic monographs may be the wave of the future. But publishers must first build an infrastructure for citations, copyrights, authentication, and preservation.

IN A MUCH-DISCUSSED ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN the New York Review of Books last spring, historian Robert Darnton proposed a new form of scholarly publication: a document that would exploit the unique attributes of electronic communications instead of merely imitating the flat, traditional world of print.1 Darnton imagined a complex, interconnected work with different levels of information stacked one on top of the other to form a pyramid. The top level might report briefly on a historian's research and its findings, the next layer down could flesh out the arguments or present alternatives, and the third level would contain the documentation on which the work rests, along with interpretive essays. The fourth layer would feature discussions of theoretical and historiographical questions; the fifth, suggestions for teaching; and the sixth, an open-ended archive of reviews, editorial correspondence, letters from readers, and so forth.

Readers of such a work could explore this pyramid as fully as they wished. General readers might read only the top layer. Specialists, however, could examine alternative hypotheses, assessing the documentary evidence for themselves, or they could delve into the theoretical and historiographic issues that shaped the author's interpretation. The top layer might be made available as a paperback book, but any or all of the layers could be printed out as needed, and-perhaps most important-electronic links between layers could be developed and followed, and new meanings explored. Readers could skim across the surface of any level in the pyramid, but they could also burrow down through them-a possibility that, in Darnton's words, "would elicit a new kind of reading."

A new kind of reading? Darnton doesn't elaborate, but I understand him to mean that his model will begin to exploit one of the most fascinating possibilities of electronic communication: its ability to present a web of information through which the reader, in theory, can navigate as effortlessly as thought arcing from one idea to the next. Darnton's model suggests an electronic artifact-one no longer constrained by the imperative of a linear, printed text to begin just here and end precisely there-that expands dramatically the mental space in which we read a book. At the same time, his model does not catapult its readers into a chaos of unmediated information but imposes a boundary on itself capable of giving a work shape and form. The work is still about this, and not that. It still starts here, and may even still end over there, although in granting its readers the freedom to follow a more complex and many-branched route from here to there, it allows new meanings and endings to emerge.

For all the demands this complexity may place on the reader, it has, for Darnton, a richly compensating virtue: it imitates the work of doing history itself. He writes:

Any historian who has done long stints of research knows the frustration over his or her inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past. If only my reader could have a look inside this box, you say to yourself, at all the letters in it, not just the lines from the letters I am quoting. If only I could follow that trail in my text just as I pursued it through the dossiers, when I felt free to take detours leading away from my main subject. If only I could show how themes crisscross outside my narrative and extend far beyond the boundaries of my book. Not that books should be exempt from the imperative of trimming a narrative down to a graceful shape. But instead of using an argument to close a case, they could open up new ways of making sense of the evidence, new possibilities of making available the raw materials embedded in the story, a new consciousness of the complexities involved in construing the past.

This is wonderfully heady stuff, and no doubt other scholars in the humanities and social sciences can imagine variations of Darnton's model that would open up creative possibilities in their own fields. University presses are eager to develop electronic technology to improve scholarly communication-to make it richer in meaning, better able to disseminate the results of scholarly research, more efficient, and less costly. In fact, we already know how to build the kind of monograph Darnton has proposed. We may lack a few of the tools we need to actually construct it, but developing them shouldn't be a major task.

So what's stopping us? Why aren't all scholarly publishers charging full speed ahead into the future that Darnton imagines? Part of the reason is economic. I am not going to parse the costs of electronic versus print publishing here, but I will heartily second Darnton's recognition that the initial costs of making the transition from print to electronic publishing will be high. The real reason we are cautious, though, is more fundamental. True, if we build it, people will probably come. But when they get there, what will they find?