Books have a material history, writing and texts assigned value in the physical form of books. The social significance of the book is under revision in digital environment. The material counterpart of textuality is codicity--the significance, value, authority of the codex book from script to print and now digital form. The ideology of the book is sustained by a network of social and political institutions--schools, literacy, publishing industry, copyright law, social class expectations. The book has always embodied technology and convergence in technology: the old technologies of the book are usually transparent to us as technology (part of the ideology of the book): the printed codex, and print technology in general, seems "natural" to us. Beware of technological determinism (McLuhan, Ong, Postman, Birkerts, etc.) Regis Debray and …show more content…
text as weave of language separable. Book as nodal point, node in a network of texts and other material books. Any book is always already a node, not simply a delimited object. The abstract and material texts: The abstract text of editors and the abstract text of literary theory. Text has been dematerialized, abstracted from a necessary material bookness, since modern printing. Renaissance printing still linked to "codicity" (the material union of text, type, page, and book). On one level, the text has always been a node in a network, a momentary configuration of language, genres, styles. The digital abstraction of the text for multiple material channels of representation, display, and design is only a step in the cultural logic of "mechanical reproduction" as described by Walter Benjamin. Modern notions of the pure, authentic text without embedding in accrued commentary or anything that is not the "authors": why do these ideas seem transparent or natural? Modern notions of the text and the book are embedded in notions of authorship, ownership, property, and book as