II

Above and beyond the text of the primal book that serves as its staging point, the processed book has at least five aspects, which may overlap; and some of these aspects are more developed today than others:

A. The book as portal.

Can't you do this with even our lowly primal book? You can do some of it. Printed books can have footnotes and bibliographies; they may have other metadata as well, such as an author's preface, an afterword by a scholar, or even a collection of critical essays (see, for example, the excellent Norton Critical Editions). Publishers have done great things with print, and they have every reason to be proud. But the primal book breaks down in the face of the microprocessor much as a horse would in a race with an SUV. The printed book has a footnote, but the processed book can have the full text of the citation. A bibliography in a processed book can be tantamount to a library dedicated to a particular subject. You can read a printed book with a good dictionary at your side, but with the processed book you can look up every entry in Webster's Third New International Dictionary with a mere click or two; and the lucky members of some academic institutions can now read a word's entire history in the OED.

But the electronic portal goes far beyond even this, connecting readers to specialized databases of information and online services. A bibliography in an ebook can link to the online catalog of a nearby university library, where you can determine if a particular book is in the collection. Or readers of Books in Print, a huge reference work marketed mostly to publishing-industry professionals, can look up any title they desire and then check the inventory status of that book with two of the nation's leading book wholesalers. This particular reference book, in other words, has become a "front end" to a business process by which booksellers can restock their stores. The processed book has the potential to make the contents of a book actionable, not merely readable.

One aspect of the book as portal is that it undermines the reading experience even as it augments it. Reading is linear and requires concentration. A portal link takes the reader away from the author's linear design and focuses his or her attention on other text. While that text may enrich the meaning of the original book, it also distracts the reader, who then must reorient him or herself upon returning to the primary material. As authors become increasingly aware of the potentialities of the processed book, we should expect that they will begin to write with these jumps in attention in mind. Perhaps they will encourage leaping, perhaps not; or perhaps they will learn to accommodate this aspect of the medium, just as audiobook publishers have learned to give their listeners special cues to help them with the transition from print to sound ("This is Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, cassette four, side two").

What will be especially interesting to see in the years ahead is whether authors will begin to regard their own work as portals and begin to write with an eye toward extending the book beyond its own contours. They could never do this in the printed form; it would be peculiar to ebooks. Perhaps some authors will be more open to including obscure references, knowing that the reader can obtain a gloss with a simple click. One wonders what T. S. Eliot would say if he were alive today and could view Ray Parker's online annotated version of "The Waste Land" (http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/explore.html). On the other hand, it may be that some authors will resent the ease with which obscure references can be glossed electronically. For example, part of the meaning of the notoriously elliptical poetry of Ezra Pound lies in its very obscurity, in the sheer difficulty of catching all the allusions to other works. (For those unfamiliar with Pound, think of the allusive music of Elvis Costello or Smashmouth.) As a processed book, Pound's Cantos would lose some of its aesthetics of difficulty as every allusion is presented to the reader with helpful commentary. If Pound had been aware of the possibility of the processed book, he might have written a different kind of poetry altogether. I am inclined to think, though, that the processed book will make all writing, from serious literature to notes to the baby-sitter, more Pound-like for everyone--except Pound's disciples, who, perversely, will seek to distinguish themselves by the clarity and completeness of their expression. Ebooks are likely to become increasingly compressed as the need to spell everything out in the primary text is lessened by the one-click availability of explanatory texts. Writing, in other words, becomes not simple expression but also computer-assisted calculation. It is not too much to say that Pound, with his enormous influence on Modernist aesthetics, helped create the intellectual pressure that made the development of electronic publishing necessary.