v bush meets christo by way of sophie
Roger Sperberg is doing some interesting speculation on the capabilities of the well-designed e-book over at if:book: on collaborating with the reader. His vision is similar to that of Vannevar Bush’s memex: the author constructing paths through material, then distributing the paths for others to work and re-work.
Imagine a story, with multiple tracks. (I’m actually envisioning a short book, so let’s say 16 or 24 pages and 5 tracks.) On any page, you can go to the next or previous page. Or you can change tracks and see the next or previous page from some other track. It seems just like a 24-page book, except that the 5 tracks provide variations on what is on each page.
This kind of collaboration runs deep, and shifts the role of the author and the author’s relation with readers:
Collaboration with the reader must inevitably involve everything an author touches: the text, the development of the ideas, the sequence in which they are conveyed, how they are illustrated, the conclusions drawn. In a true collaboration, the author becomes something more like a director, operating perhaps at a remove (how active will the author be in reshaping the book after its publication?). Or maybe the director analogy is too strong; perhaps it’s more like an organizer — the Merry Pranksters, Christo, Lev Waleska — who launches his/her book like a vehicle (like Voyager) and then simply rides its momentum.
Some of this vision is already available – if awkward – on wikis as threads and reading paths, and we might be seeing some of it enacted in the evolving draft of GAM3R 7H30RY. But Sperberg is looking towards Sophie to develop the idea of tracking in an e-book.
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