Bones of the Book

A short essay about the digital future of books that focuses primarily on various e-book formats, constrating the failures of early experiments by publishers such as Voyager Expanded Books with more recent digital-publishing trends -- such as Touch Press's app version of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and meta-analytic tools, such as Amazon's X-Ray, which is bundled with the Kindle Touch -- that suggest the promose of expanded e-books. Electronic literature, in this narrative, receives only cursory attention. After noting that the "electronic literary vanguard tends to dislike e-books because they are too much like real books," Moor provides a brief account of electronic literature that, regretably, equates the field almost exclusively with the hypertextualists who built and wrote using StorySpace. While Moor is aware that a multiplicity of e-literary forms exist, he neglects to describe the "dreamy new places" that author-programmers have subsequently built. For those interested in digital-literary aesthetics, the essay is best read as a guage of the suspicion about electronic literature that, as of 2012, persists in the wider literary culture.