“The Electronic Book” from The Oxford Companion to the Book
By Paul Biba
The Wall Street Journal has reprinted this section the Oxford work and it has some interesting history. Here’s part of it:
In July 1945 Vannevar Bush, a pioneering engineer in the development of analog computing, published an article in which he introduced the Memex: a hypothetical instrument to control the ever-accumulating body of scientific literature. He envisioned an active desk that performed as a storage and retrieval system. A Memex user would consult a book by tapping a code on a keyboard, bringing up the text. The Memex had many features that are now familiar components of e-books: pages, page turners, annotation capability, internal and external linking, and the potential for storage, retrieval, and transmittal. However, Bush imagined that all this would be accomplished through the miracle of microfilm.
(via Resource Shelf)
March 8th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Bush’s article is fascinating not only because it anticipates eBooks. It also anticipates hyperlinking and many of the social aspects of reading that we’re talking about and wrestling with today. (Especially relevant for non-fiction and scholarly works).
Rob Preece
Publisher