That’s the title of an article by Joseph Esposito in The Scholarly Kitchen. Esposito argues that there are six types of “affordances” in ebooks – that is six types of properties that can make a particular form of ebook possible.
He calls these The Institutional Book; The Classic Ebook; The Enhanced Book: The Muscular Book; The Social Book; and the Staccato Book, and then he goes on to discuss the properties of each. For example, the Staccato Book:
Recently the so-called cellphone novel became a huge commercial success in Japan. This new form consists of works of fiction written within the 140-character limit of the SMS standard — that is, each section of the novel is essentially a text message. Book publishers in Japan then republish these works and sell them profitably; ironically, the form of monetization is print.
What exactly is the container for the Staccato Book? It’s hard to say. On one hand, the Staccato Book is a creature of the mobile phone and texting (hence the name I have assigned it), but on the other hand, the Staccato Book is a component of traditional print publishing, which completes the business model. The Staccato Book is thus inherently cross-platform and multimodal.
Check out the rest of them at the site.
