Two completely separate blog posts recently drove home the question of defining a text’s format. Is it a book? A document? A source file? Together they reveal the shifting nature of the definitions we use when we talk about publishing…or writing, or website development, or pretty much everything ever.
The first is from The Passive Voice, in discussion of blogger Jaye Manus’ how-to regarding source files. The issue here is that given the wide variety of formats that are considered “publishing” these days (blogs, websites, ebooks of various types, printed documents, audio files, etc.) that writers should not think in terms of “documents” (as in, a Microsoft Word document file, for instance) but “source file,” which is a stripped down text-only version of the document that is suitable for importing into various publishing tools.
TPV carries it further in his own breakdown of the topic: “For a programmer, my shopping list, Joyce’s Ulysses, and this web page are all just strings of characters.” And that is TRUE. It is true for everything.
So carry that thought on to the next piece of the puzzle, Porter Anderson’s guest post (at Jane Friedman’s blog) reviewing and discussing Hugh McGuire’s TEDxMontreal talk about the impending obsolescence of ebooks.
The discussion at that post is not about a particular format will be obsolete or even that “books” as texts will disappear, but that our current terminology for what a book is happens to be based on a very old technology. What is a book relation to the Gutenberg Project, or (my example, which I used in a comment at that blog post) Archiveofourown.org?
This, of course, is not really a new idea for those of use working in text studies, such as librarians and digital archivists and digital humanities scholars. What is significant here is how the issue is now bleeding out into the mainstream dialogue surrounding publishing. Jane Friedman, as Anderson points out, is pushing for people to revisit the idea of “book as authority” as writers start to self-publish in a myriad of formats, from printed books to serialized web-based stories.
McGuire is well known among those of us keeping an eye on the development of text technologies in regards to the publishing industry from co-editing Book: A Futurists Manifesto, which should be required reading for anyone reading this blog. What he’s arguing, though, is that as far as the future goes, we simply don’t know what is in store. The interim is source files that can be ported into any format; the future might be a complete separation of the concept of text from file format.
I’d argue that’s already happening.
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