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• 1 2016-12-06T04:55:21-08:00 The Warping of the Book 20 How Books Change Form image_header 2016-12-12T06:00:16-08:00 When imagining the future of their medium, authors often stretch and bend the book to its limits. While the codex has stood the test of time, many have sought to look beyond it towards a new form, one that they believe will take its rightful place next in the line of succession of bookforms stretching back into antiquity. These works, often theoretical (occasionally impractical), take myriad shapes in their efforts to distill what their creators thought was the true essence of "bookness".
  
  Each of these new bookforms has some unique feature reflecting what its creator thought the codex most lacked. The book, as it stands, is a limited medium, and some have tried to surpass its limits by changing it fundamentally. Different authors go about this in different ways, but the results all speak to the same idea. These works are united by the sense that each author thought that the book was missing some crucial element, that it did not fulfill some essential requirement, and the belief that it would soon die as a result.
  
  This idea of the book as moribund is a pervasive one. Every time a new medium appears and gains a degree of traction, doomsday prophets come out of the woodwork to lament the destruction of the long tradition of knowledge. Newspapers, magazines, radio, and television have all killed the book at one point or another. Advancing technology is often viewed as a death knell for more traditional forms, but they can also serve to augment them. Many writers are inspired by new inventions: for Bob Brown, it was the movie; for Octave Uzanne, audio recording; and for Vannevar Bush, the computer.
  
  The following works all make suppositions about how the book is, will be, or should be.