The End of Books

Shockingly, I learned that I was not as in the middle of the advent of the World Wide Web as I thought I was. In 1993 / '94, I was first exposed to the web and was thrilled for 2 reasons, it was something new and exciting, and I was in at the ground floor. This article puts me on notice that I was at a minimum of 2 years behind as Coover's article was first published in 1992. If this is the case for this article, then the technology was even older. I didn't start using the web until 1994. Epic fail? Not really, but I'm not as hip as I thought I was... I'm very sad.

Still, I'm very excited about the idea that again, we see a consistent pattern of folks predicting stuff. I think I have learned enough in this class to listen to Coover. In this case, I trust in the concept and the eventuality that we will see the end of books, though perhaps not so much due to hypertext. As a matter of fact, I am less inclined to care about hypertext in reading material; if I pick up a 300 to 400-page book and that has hypertext, my reading may never end. To be true, when I read articles that have a lot of hypertext, I rarely follow links so that I do not lose the thread of the story. When I find certain concepts of interest to me, I follow those ideas.

Finally, my notes indicate that the interesting points in this reading for me were that the article I read was in ink on paper (no link / hypertext), which I found ironic. I also made note of the concept of "author - readers"; I contend that this concept was an unwitting prediction to what has become Wikipedia, or any Wiki proper for that matter. If that's not awesome and grounds for trusting these frontier observers we've been reading, I don't know what is...