Table of Contents

Geoffrey Nunberg, Introduction Carla Hesse, The Book in Time James J. O'Donnell, Trithemius, McLuhan, Cassiodorus: The Pragmatics of the New Paul Duguid, Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book Geoffrey Nunberg, Farewell to the Information Age Regis Debray, Dematerialization and Desacralization: The Book as a Symbolic Object Patrick Bazin, Towards Meta-reading Luca Toschi, Hypertext and the Author: New Texts, Old Roots George Landow, Twenty Minutes into the Future, or How Are We Moving beyond the Book? Raffaele Simone, The Body of the Text Jay David Bolter, Ekphrasis, Virtual Reality, and the Future of Writing Michael Joyce, (Re)placing the Author: "A Book in the Ruins" Umberto Eco, Afterword

About the Author

Geoffrey Nunberg is a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a professor of Linguistics at Stanford University.

Reviews

In his introduction to The Future of the Book, editor Nunberg (linguistics, Stanford Univ.) says there has been extremism among both technology lovers and haters. "Ultimately," he writes, "the technologies cannot themselves determine how or where they will be deployed. This is left for us to decide." This work consists of 11 scholarly papers by mostly academics presented at a recent conference. Contributors include Nunberg, Carla Hesse, James O'Donnell, Paul Duguid, Nunberg, Regis Debray, and Patrick Brazin. The presenters take a variety of approaches to the ways, rates, and degrees to which the computer might kill the book., e.g., historical, philosophical, and inguistic. No author rejects computers or sees their takeover as complete and immediate. An index is needed. Of primary interest to academic libraries.