Adriaan van der Weel

Why don’t we read hypertext novels?

Ever since their appearance in the early 1990s, hypertext novels were presented as the pinnacle of digital aesthetics and claimed to represent the revolutionary future of literature. However, as a literary phenomenon, hypertext novels have remained marginal. The article presents some scientifically derived explanations as to why hypertext novels do not have a mass audience and why they are likely to remain a marginal contribution in the history of literature. Three explanatory frameworks are provided: (1) how hypertext relates to our cognitive information processing in general; (2) the empirically derived psychological reasons for how we read and enjoy literature in particular; and (3) the likely evolutionary origins of such a predilection for storytelling and literature. It is shown how hypertext theory, by ignoring such knowledge, has yielded misguided statements and uncorroborated claims guided by ideology rather than by scientifically supported knowledge.

From an Ownership to an Access Economy of Publishing

One of the major challenges facing the book industry today is the ongoing analogue–digital hybridity of consumer behaviour. Finding the right answers to the problems this presents to publishers requires an acute awareness of the intrinsic differences between analogue and digital media. This article suggests that it is helpful to regard digital publishing as an access economy and, in particular, to regard ebooks as like a broadcast medium.

Subtitling and the SBS Audience

Examines the extent to which the SBS TV practice of subtitling might contribute to audience resistance to SBS programs. Four major problem areas are identified: psychological, cultural, linguistic and technical. Suggests that research into audience attitudes to subtitling carried out in other countries might have limited validity for SBS in view of the unusual composition of its audience. which includes a large proportion of non-native speakers of the subtitling language, English.

Memory and the Reading Substrate

From the first celts and arrowheads, technology has been regarded as a welcome servant. Mostly the servant can be trusted, though things do occasionally go wrong. As an all-purpose dogsbody, the digital electronic computer is without doubt the technology of technologies, the servant to outperform all servants. It is invading — or has already invaded — more aspects of our life than any other technology before it, and reaches parts other technologies cannot reach. Its very ubiquity, however, also makes us acutely aware of our dependence on it. Perhaps even more than that other ubiquitous technology, electricity, at times this dependence can make us feel rather uncomfortable, not to say vulnerable. This sense of vulnerability is what inspired the recent exhibition ‘Memory Palace’ in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Porter Gallery.1 It started from a specially commissioned fictional text by the novelist Hari Kunzru, describing a future world in which all digitally stored information has been lost through an event referred to as ‘the Withering’. In fact, in Kunzru’s story, reading, writing and even memory itself are now illegal.

e-Roads and i-Ways A Sociotechnical Look at User Acceptance of E-Books

Despite repeated claims of a definitive breakthrough, e-book uptake remains surprisingly slow. Many factors that aid or inhibit the acceptance of this new text technology have been identified. These factors include technological as well as social ones. So far, most commentators have emphasised technological and socioeconomic ones. This paper1 will be arguing that research on user uptake of the e-book needs to take into account sociocultural factors that are currently underresearched. Taking cognizance of the sociocultural context will give a better insight into the conditions that need to be met for a successful introduction, marketing, and uptake of e-books, and it will account for local (national or regional) variation.

Book Trade Archives to Book Trade Networks.

N that so many national histories of the book are being produced around the globe, it is a good time to return to the exploration of international book trade relations with renewed vigour. Many national ‘history of the book’ publication projects in progress will no doubt feature chapters on the international book trade, but in more ways than one the nation state places needlessly narrow geographical boundaries on the study of even predominantly national book trades. Though his chief focus was the eighteenth century – before the convergence of linguistic and national boundaries had consolidated – Robert Darnton’s remarks in What Is the History of Books ? are pertinent for any period :

WORSENING IN WORSTWARD HO : A Brief Look at the Genesis of the Text

MS 2602 in the Beckett Archives at Reading University Library contains the manuscript and typescript drafts for Becketts last major prose work, Worstward Ho. It consists of 21 roughly A5-sized sheets of manuscript torn out of a spiral-bound notebook, and two sets of A4 sized typescript, ten and nine sheets respectively. The first manuscript draft (to be referred to as MSI), dated 9 and 12 August 1981, covers the first four pages. It is then abandoned, in favour of the holograph manuscript which follows it (to be referred to as MS2), dated 20 September 1981 to 17 March 1982. The typescripts (to be referred to as TS1 and TS2) bear no date; as internal evidence (typed and handwritten corrections) bears out, they are both also Becketts own. Collation of this material promises to furnish some interesting insights into Becketts compositional method in general. However, our primary purpose for turning to this rich source is to add a chapter to the book-length study of Worstward Ho that we are currently preparing. Worstward Ho is no doubt one of the most hermetic of Becketts texts, and our approach is to pursue as many different ways into the text as promise to yield a significant contribution to our understanding of it, the study of the MS and TS drafts being one of them. Though we are still in the process of transcription,1 it is possible at this stage to present some preliminary findings, deriving from a comparison between the abandoned first draft (the first four pages of manuscript, referred to as MSI) and the final published text. In particular, it appears possible to confirm some of the expectations/hypotheses deriving from our study of Worstward Ho so far. In the following we shall look at two of these.