we pause
TeleRead and if:book both have technical problems. This interrupt is considered opportune since the breaking news is of e-book screen failures. Of three most popular reading devices, screen failure is approaching 25%.
No news is good news from the print sector which has not reported a single page display failure. The situation crosses into script act theory where unrealized meanings are consequential. Evidently print has reported no incident of lap heat or fan buzz or charge drain either.
infrastructure
All books are electronic. They are delivered to either screen or paper or both. Either way, if electronic versions are products of print production or print production is a by-product of electronic publication, the whole activity is digital and the whole outcome is readable content. So the scholarly interest in editorial control has already crossed into new territory. But it is surprising that there is no sense of chaos. The chaos arises when editorial control long associated with print is applied to electronic editions or when a new absence of editorial control associated with on-line publication is applied to print editions.
From Gutenberg to Google by Peter Shillingsburg invokes script act theory to examine the situation of scholarly publication with an unjustified disposition to orderly transition. The potential of disjunction and a more promising future of scholarly print is discounted.
The bias is well expressed by an exemplary ambiguity; "It can be questioned whether textuality, in the constrained form of print, has been allowed to reveal its nature fully." (p.85) Does this statement pose a visualization of print escaped from its analog constraint to its digital fulfillments? Or is the meaning a contrary visualization of the future of the print attribute of constraint liberated to self fulfillment and to a bright future as a re-preferred context for scholarly publication?
And what a long dance around the distinctive strengths of self-authenticating print and self-indexing screen reading without clearly allocating these attributes to their transmission functions and to their formats.
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