A concept that stood out to me from Robert Coover’s article, The End of Books, is that hypertext doesn’t translate into print (pg. 8). Today many books, magazines, and periodicals have been digitized. Some even start that way and have no printed versions. However, if a document is first published in hypertext, it is difficult to make a print version because it is not linear. Hypertext allows a reader to venture off the page and do things like search the dictionary or visit a location on a map, and come back to the page when ready. Those features would be lost in a digital to print conversion, changing the direction of the text.Â
In Writing Space by Jay David Bolter, he points out how the term book has been used to describe or represent some electronic devices (pg. 79). The Chromebook, PowerBook, and Omnibook are laptops that were designed to be portable, like a book. He states that these devices are in fact hybrid books. They are not just portable, but they function like a book and not just as a computer. I am familiar with these devices and thought the name referred to their size, not their function.Â
