
The Unbound Book
Pallas Publications (Publisher)
Published on 15. December 2013
Book
Paperback/Softback
168 pages
978-90-8964-600-2 (ISBN)
Description
What might the digital revolution we're currently living through mean for conventional paper books? Is there a future for the long-form text at all? At the onset of the digital deluge, books had evolved into the perfect reading machine. In the screen era, technology increasingly and emphatically foregrounds itself in the digital reading experience. It is one thing to identify what we lose in the process (which is a natural human tendency), but quite another and, it might be argued, an ultimately more fruitful one, to identify how that screen technology might shape the activities for which we always used to use paper. Screen technology is likely to determine our learning and entertainment habits. Indeed, the 'industrial' forms of reading that may be performed by the computer have a very tenuous relationship to what we have always understood by the term. Awareness of the issues, and eventually new insights, are essential if we want screen technology to offer a digital future to the long-form text.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academic
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations: 0 black and white; 6 full color.
Dimensions
Height: 231 mm
Width: 155 mm
Thickness: 13 mm
Weight
249 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-8964-600-2 (9789089646002)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Joost Kircz | Adriaan van der Weel
The Unbound Book
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€52.49
Available for download

Joost Kircz | Adriaan van der Weel
The Unbound Book
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€52.49
Available for download
Persons
Joost Kircz is emeritus reader in electronic publishing at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History at the University of Leiden, the European editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the author of Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge.
Adriaan van der Weel is Bohn Professor of Modern Dutch Book History at the University of Leiden, the European editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the author of Changing Our Textual Minds: Towards a Digital Order of Knowledge.
Content
The book unbinding, 'I read the titles on the spines and remember': The unbound reader of the future, What a book was and what remains, Thoughts about the future of trade publishing, Social reading is no longer an oxymoron, 81,498 words The book as data object, Bound to be a book, Towards print as multimedia and e-books as paperbacks, Digital readers' responsibilities, The digitisation of narrative reading, Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence, E-reading essentials in a time of change and unfixity, Electronic environments for reading, A select annotated bibliography of pertinent hardware and software (2011), Writing differently in the digital era Hamlet in Hyperborg, About the authors, References