Abstract
For as long as it has existed in its modern form, the academic book has operated in what Jerome McGann calls ‘a double helix of perceptual codes: the linguistic codes […] and the bibliographical codes’. It unites a particular discursive genre with a particular material format. But now the double helix is starting to unravel as new, genetically modified digital formats force us to rethink what the academic book can be. This moment of media change meshes with shifts in the funding and assessment of research, developments in researchers’ intellectual agendas and the challenges of Open Access. As disciplinary boundaries become more porous and scholarly outputs more varied, these changes will affect every stage in the life-cycle of the academic book.
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Jerome McGann (1991) The Textual Condition ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press ), p. 77.
Bonnie Mak (2011) How the Page Matters ( Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press).
Elizabeth Eisenstein (1980) The Printing Press as an Agent of Change ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Chad Wellmon (2015) Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University ( Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin (1976) The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450–1850, trans. D. Gerard ( New York: Verso )
Adrian Johns (2000) The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
See, e.g., Franco Moretti (2005) Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History ( New York: Verso )
Franco Moretti (2013) Distant Reading ( New York: Verso).
Nicholas Carr (2011) The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains ( New York: Norton )
Maryanne Wolf (2008) Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain ( New York: HarperCollins).
Naomi Baron (2015) Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World ( Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Among many examples, see Andrew Piper (2012) Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press )
Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008) Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination ( Boston: MIT Press )
Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland (2009) Transferred Illusions: Digital Technology and the Forms of Print ( London: Ashgate).
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Mole, T. (2016). The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact. In: Lyons, R.E., Rayner, S.J. (eds) The Academic Book of the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137595775_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137595775_2
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