Book 2.0 - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2013

The publishing value chain has remained relatively consistent since the invention of the printing press. Robert Darnton’s influential model of the communications circuit of the book, which tracks how intellectual property circulated in eighteenth-century France, has been a largely accurate representation of the publishing industry until the late twentieth century. This article examines changes to the publishing industry, particularly as a result of the disruptions and disintermediations of the digital age, and proposes a re-drawing of the communications circuit for the twenty-first century. The research in this article was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council grant number AH/J01317X/1The Book Unbound: Disruption and Disintermediation in the Digital Age.

This article analyses the impact of technology on the activity and strategies of publishers within visual culture. Existing publishers, heavily involved with publications in print, are urgently required to adjust their future strategies, while emerging companies are grasping opportunities presented by creating online content, e-books and apps. As in the past, artists and designers have played an important role in the development and innovation of twenty-first century publication design and despite the shift to digital, the printed book is still the predominant product. However, it finds that publishers are creatively using digital media and developing technologies in convergence to promote and take publications to market, whilst also concentrating on generating a more closely connected cultural community of readers, using websites, social media, the gallery and associated live events.

This article examines a central aspect of bookishness in the digital age, wherein the coexistence of paper codices along with their electronic counterparts fosters the interaction of life and code, as code is the inscription of life, and life the instantiation of code. Ark Codex ± 0 exemplifies this feedback loop. Ark Codex ± 0 traces the development of biological organisms through scientific notation, language and math, all while illustrating a bloody collage of the biblical myth. The Calamari Press, its vanity publisher, situates itself as a codex-maker in a time of digital production by privileging the book form over the digital file, while simultaneously fostering a print culture through digital paratexts, such as videos of the production process, on its website. While you can purchase the book for $40 on the Calamari site, a pdf of Ark Codex ± 0 is also offered at a ‘pay what you want rate’. Ark Codex ± 0 is a remix with multiple channels of distribution, a text you encounter in multiple ways. This article argues that the new environment of print culture elicits not only the act of reading, but an embodied encounter with the text both in vivo and in silico, the vital forms of bookwork in the digital age.

Using Gérard Genette’’s seminal work on ‘paratexts’ (defined by Genette (1997) as extratextual items which fundamentally influence a reader’s reception of a text, such as, for example, blurbs, jacket designs, prefaces, etc.), this article undertakes a practical enquiry into the ways in which digital media have been used to render the paratexts of medieval manuscripts. Reference to an existing project, Christine de Pizan: the Making of the Queen’s Manuscript, is made so as to form a case study on this area, one that acts representatively, due to its use of software features, methods and tools that have been applied in a number of digital/medieval projects. This case study will constitute a lens for exploring how successfully manuscriptural paratexts are represented by completed digitization projects by applying Genette’s theory of paratextual spaces. The article will then consider some of the latest developments in digital tools for medievalists under the same light so as to see how differently such projects can now be approached. Ultimately, the article will explore how the broader application of publishing theory could move manuscript digitization projects forward because, just as book publishing actually constitutes an exercise in content packaging – which is traditionally the realm of publishing professionals – the process of creating digital manuscripts, and digital editions of medieval texts, represents a closely related undertaking.

The Publishing Business: From p-Books to e-Books, Kelvin Smith (2013) Lausanne: AVA Publishing SA, pp. 208 ISBN: 978-2940411627, p/bk Nick Canty, UCL