Questions for Kari Kraus

In comics, great revelations are often hidden behind page turns. This phenomenon also occasionally appears in books. I can’t see how this can be intentional, but it nonetheless changes the impact of the novel to the reader. Books printed together all have the same information on the same pages. Ebooks, however, mush the entire book together as a long string of text, dividing them in whichever way fits your screen and your font size. Which, then is the purer form of the text, the printed book, bound to its physical form, or the ebook, which is continuous text?

On page 77, you refer to the parallels between print and digital media. This is especially apparent in the example of the book printed to resemble a twitter feed. Should we endeavor to go further with electronic media? That is, are we limiting ourselves to media that is easily translatable into print, such as the tweets?

This is a very random question. In today’s world, if the writings of an old master are found in a cave somewhere, they are considered priceless relics. If, in the future, I become a great scholar, and write a masterpiece on a word document which is gets lost on my computer and found a few thousand years later, would the word document be a priceless relic, or is it not in the nature of this kind of media to be considered that way?

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