The Case of City of Bits
In 1995 I had a chance to
explore these questions in a practical context when, with the MIT Press, I
published my book City of
Bits. Since it dealt with the digital revolution and the new
relationships that were being created between the material and virtual worlds,
we decided that it should be self-exemplifying-that it should appear
simultaneously as a hardback
(3)
and in a full-text World Wide Web version. (4)
As far as I know, it was the first book to be published simultaneously in print
and on the Web. (At the very least, it could not have had many
predecessors.)
We made the marketing people happy by providing a link to
an online
order form from the opening screen of the Web site; enter your name
and address, include your credit card number (in a secure transaction), click to
transmit your order, and a copy gets sent to you immediately. Conversely, we
published the URL (the address in cyberspace) of the Web version on the
dustjacket of the print version. So a reader of either one could always
conveniently obtain the other.
We provided free access to the Web
version. (As the Web develops, convenient mechanisms for charging for access to
online material are being put in place, and these will obviously be crucial to
the development of an online publishing industry. But these were not highly
developed when we put City of Bits online, and attempting to charge
just didn't seem worth the trouble at that point. (5))
There was some risk in this, of course; why would anyone buy a copy when the
online version was right there at no cost? Perhaps we would lose sales. But we
guessed that the additional sales generated by the Web site would outweigh such
losses, and there is some good evidence that we were right; in the first two
printings, about 2% of the total sales were directly through the online order
form, and it is likely that the Web site also stimulated bookstore and
mail-order sales.
Why should this be so? The answer is that the hardback
and online versions added value to the text in different and complementary
fashions. (The dimensions of that complementarity will be explored in the
discussion that follows.) So readers of the Web version are not necessarily
potential customers for the hardback. And lots of people decided that they
wanted both, to use in different ways.
Hardback, Paperback, and No-back
Of course, publishing a book in
different versions is not a new idea; it has long been a common strategy to put
out both hardbacks and paperbacks. The hardback is more expensive and more
robust, and it is aimed at libraries and at buyers who want to keep it
permanently on their bookshelves, while the paperback is cheaper is not designed
to have such a long life. Depending on the content and the marketing strategy
for a particular book, it may appear in hardback only, in paperback only, in
paperback with a small number of hardbacks for sale to libraries, or in hardback
followed by a less expensive paperback at a later point.
With the Web,
the online no-back emerges as a third option at the inexpensive and ephemeral
end of the spectrum. It can be used, even by very small publishers, to achieve
instant world-wide distribution; certainly we found, with City of Bits,
that it was quite widely read and even reviewed in some countries long before
copies of the hardback were available there. But, since publishers generally
have not begun to guarantee the permanent existence of Web sites, you still need
a hardback copy if you want to be sure of continued access in the
future.
You may also want a well designed, well produced print version
for ease of extended reading, portability, and just the sheer pleasure of it. By
comparison with even the very best laptop computer, a well made book is light,
tough (you can drop a book without damaging it, but not a laptop), comfortable
in the hand, and usable anywhere. It has an extremely high-contrast,
high-resolution display, and the access mechanism (turning pages) is a lot nicer
than using a mouse and cursor to scroll text down a screen. Indeed, I have often
thought that, if Gutenberg had invented the personal computer and printed books
had not appeared until the 1980s, we would now be hailing paper and print as a
major technological advance!
As forward-looking computer technologists
will be quick to point out, things won't stay this way. Computers will become
lighter, less fragile, and more portable. The quality of displays will improve.
Sophisticated home and office printers will allow production of high quality,
personalized print copies on demand. We may even see the emergence of
programmable "smart paper" allowing development of devices that combine
the virtues of the portable computer and the book. (
6). But, for the moment at least, the hardback, the paperback, and
the electronic no-back have significantly different properties and roles.
Getting the Reader's Attention
The first task of a book
especially a trade book that's supposed to attract an audience is to get
itself picked up and read. So the hardback City of Bits has a vivid,
colorful dustjacket to catch the reader's attention; it's carefully designed to
stand out on a bookstore display or a library shelf. When you take it in your
hand, you find a brief description and author biography on the flyleaf. Then you
can flip through it to see what's inside.
The Web version clearly had to
attract attention in very different ways, and making sure that it did so was a
key to success. Several strategies were used.
First, a hot-link was made
from the entry in the MIT Press's online catalogue to the
City of Bits site. So much as bookstore browsers can pick up a
copy of the hardback Web-surfing catalogue browsers can immediately get
their hands on the online version. And the first thing that the online version
presents is a Welcome
page with links to a Synopsis, the author's Home Page, and the
Table of Contents. Thus, to provide one path into the online City of Bits, the
metaphor of an "electronic bookstore" was fairly closely followed.
Hot-links from other Web sites provide a second way in. City of
Bits was quickly listed in many online, classified Internet and Web guides,
"Cool Sites" collections, online newsletters and magazines, home pages of
organizations and individuals who wanted to draw attention to it, and online
reading lists for classes of various kinds. Some of these links were sought and
negotiated by members of the City of Bits WWW team, but many appeared
spontaneously. Most were one-way, from the other site to City of Bits,
but some were reciprocal a fixed "you point to me and I'll point to you"
arrangement. The ultimate effect was to create a very large, electronic
"catchment" to collect potential readers and efficiently funnel them to the
site.
The third strategy for bringing in readers is to attract the
attention of Web search
engines. Typically, these engines explore the Web periodically to
create large indexes and directories, then, in response to users' queries,
employ these indexes and directories to provide very rapid access to the
relevant Web sites. They perform their explorations in a variety of ways-by
looking for specified keywords in the titles or headers of Web documents, by
scanning through the documents themselves, or even by searching other indexes
and directories. They are usually pretty dumb, since they just look for keyword
matches. So, to make sure that your site is not missed by the search engines
which have now become very important tools for finding one's way around
the Web you must make sure that the appropriate descriptors are included
in titles and headers, and in the text of the opening pages. Incidentally, you
can reliably attract a lot of attention by scattering words like "sex" and
"nude" through your text but it may not be the sort of attention that you
want!
A fourth possible strategy, which we have not used, is closely
analogous to pinpoint direct-mail marketing. When Web-surfers access your
server, it is technically possible to collect a lot of information about them
who they are, where they are from, what links they followed to get to your
site, what browser they were using, what they looked at, and so on. If you are
prepared to ignore the obvious privacy issues, you can use this information to
target electronic advertising. So, for example, Web-surfers who looked at MIT
Press online catalogue entries for other books on related topics might get email
promoting City of Bits.
Reading Tools and their Effects
In traditional fashion, the
hardback version of City of Bits is a narrative divided into chapters
on different sub-topics and it has a table of contents and an index to guide the
reader through the material. This allows for multiple styles of reading; you can
follow a continuous thread straight through from beginning to end, you can jump
immediately to particular chapters that interest you, you can use the index to
find passages on particular topics, and you can even cruise the index (or the
endnotes) to look for entries that may pique your interest. You can skim quickly
or you can read more slowly and attentively. You may make notes as you go, or
you may not. You may read in strict sequence, or you may jump back and
forth.
The physical book is not only a repository of the textual
information, but also a reading tool that allows you to pursue these strategies
efficiently, and gives you context and feedback as you do so. Its size and shape
tells you roughly how much information it contains, and you always know how far
through it you are from the relative thicknesses of the stacks of pages under
your left and right thumbs. The springiness of the paper allows you to scan
quickly by riffling through pages with the book half open, but the mechanical
properties of the binding assure that you can also leave it open, flat on a
desktop, for more extended and careful study. Typography signals the hierarchy
of information by visually distinguishing headings, sub-headings, and body text.
A Table of Contents right at the front, an Index at the very back, and numbered
pages, provide effective search and navigation capabilities. Endnotes, with
numbered references from the text, allow backup information to be provided
without disrupting the flow of the narrative.
The online version provides
very different reading tools. Most dramatically, there is no index; it is
replaced by an internal
search engine that locates instances of user-entered keywords in
the text. From the author's viewpoint, this eliminates the intellectual drudgery
of creating an index. From the reader's viewpoint, it provides greater freedom;
you can search for anything, and you don't have to rely on the author's judgment
about what was worth including in the index. (I'm told, for example, that many
readers immediately type in their own names to see if they're mentioned
anywhere!)
The hierarchy of information is also handled differently in
the online version, since the screen can only display a limited amount of text
at one time, since current bandwidth constraints make it undesirable to download
large text files to your browser all at once, and since scrolling through a long
segment of text doesn't work nearly as effectively as flipping the pages of a
book. The complete text is organized into a hierarchy of small segments, with
internal hot-links providing the interconnections among them. At the top of the
tree is the Table
of Contents page providing entry points to each of the chapters.
Within each chapter, there is the introductory section of text followed by
hot-links to the subsections that it contains. Finally, there is the relatively
short text of each subsection. To allow for sequential reading of the narrative,
without having to go up and down the hierarchy, there are "previous" and "next"
hot-links at the end of each subsection.
Endnotes, of course, are
handled by hot-links; click on the endnote mark and you immediately get the
corresponding note. (Cross-references within the text could be handled in a
similar way, but there aren't any.) To maintain consistency with the print
version, and continuity with tradition, the notes are numbered-but, of course,
they no longer really have to be, since there's never any ambiguity about which
note relates to which point in the text.
Overall, the reading tools
provided with the online version have a very interesting effect; they privilege
the hierarchical structuring of the book's content and the operation of
searching while they make sequentially following the narrative more cumbersome
and difficult. (It's no accident, then, that CD-ROM and online books that have
these sorts of reading tools have tended to emphasize modular, classified and
indexed chunks of content as in encyclopedias and dictionaries, to provide dense
cross-referencing within the material, and to construct multi-threaded and
branching narratives-in other words, to focus on anything other than long,
continuous narrative sequences.) The hardback, on the other hand, privileges
skimming, random jumps back and forth, and the continuity of the main narrative
thread. So it's probably optimal to read the hardback first, to gain an
overview, then to go to the online version for more detailed study and for
ongoing reference.
Fixed-Format and Personalized
Good graphic designers exert very
considered and precise control over the look and feel of a printed book.
Certainly this was the case with City of Bits. The designer, Yasuyo
Iguchi chose to set it in Bembo and Meta. She arranged elements on the various
different sorts of pages, and deployed white space with care. She gave
consideration to its size, shape, proportions, weight, and rigidity. She chose
the paper, the cloth for the cover, and the matte varnish of the jacket so as to
create a particular relationship of feels and textures. All of this matters. It
all adds up to something that has the characteristic look of a MIT Press book,
and that signals something about the product's style, content, and level of
sophistication.
But the client-server architecture of the Web does not
allow a designer such precise control of the online version; it may be
downloaded to many different types of display devices, by many different types
of browsers, with many different settings of their various options, to produce
screen displays that vary enormously. This can be seen as a disadvantage (and
typically is by graphic designers, who don't like the loss of control), and the
producers of Web servers and browsers can try to eliminate as many sources of
unwanted variation as possible. Or it can be seen as an advantage-opening up the
possibility of adapting content intelligently to different contexts and to the
needs of different readers; perhaps every reader of City of Bits could
have a uniquely personalized version. (
7).
The issue of producer-control versus user-personalization
is a philosophical rather than a technical one; it is technically feasible to
implement systems that support either one or both, and to design online
productions that either go for a consistent look or encourage personalization.
In the online version of City of Bits, we tried to exert as much
control as possible to assure a reasonably high level of graphic quality,
to remain consistent with the print version, and just to keep things simple for
ourselves. But, as personalization tools become increasingly sophisticated, it
will become more interesting to try to take advantage of them.
External Hot-Links
Perhaps the most obvious and striking
difference between the hardback and the online version is that the text of the
online version contains hundreds of hot-links
to other Web sites with relevant information on the topics that are discussed.
When I discuss online shopping malls, for example, you can just click to go and
visit one. And, when I refer to Aristotle's Politics,
you can immediately access the relevant passage, online, in either English or
Greek. Thus the City of Bits site becomes a conveniently organized
entry point for exploring an enormous quantity of related information.
Some of these external hot-links are to sites that I or my research
assistant discovered and consulted when City of Bits was being written,
but the vast majority have resulted from systematically going through the text,
picking out key words, and sending search engines out on the Web to find what
was out there. Whenever a search engine discovers a relevant site, we link it
in. (You can think of this as a new form of bricollage.) This process
has to be repeated at regular intervals, since the Web is growing explosively,
and relevant new sites are continually appearing. So the structure of
intertextual linkages in which City of Bits embeds itself is a very
dynamic thing, and it looked very different, after the site had been up for a
few months, than it did when it first went online.
The converse process
is to combat link-rot by identifying and removing hot-links to sites that have
died, shifted to new locations, or become irrelevant. (If this is not done, a
site quickly loses its charm like an untended garden.) To facilitate this,
we employ a software tool that automatically runs through the text, checks all
the hot-links, and reports all those that don't seem to be
working.
Superficially, adding these links may just seem to be a more
convenient way to provide endnote citations to related publications. But, on
closer inspection, there are some important differences. One is the dynamism
that I have noted; print endnotes can only be updated, all at once, when there
is a reprint or a new edition, but hot-links can be updated incrementally and at
any time. Furthermore, you cannot add too many endnotes to a printed book
without making it bulky and unwieldy, but there is no practical limit to the
number that you can embed in an online text.
But the most important
difference is the shift in scholarly responsibility, and correspondingly in the
reader's use of the text, that the substitution of hot-links for endnote
citations entails. Recall that endnote citations are normally to printed
documents that have been formally published and do not change. A responsible
scholar is expected to check the relevance, quality, and usefulness of a cited
document, and to give publication date and page numbers; scholars who cite
irrelevant or poor-quality publications are not highly regarded. But the author
of an online publication cannot attempt to take the same responsibility, since
the contents of an externally linked site may change unpredictably, at any time;
I might, for example, discover a site containing the text of Aristotle's Politics,
check it out and assure myself that everything was in order, and then make the
link from City of Bits only to discover, some time later, that
the operator of that site had subsequently substituted several hundred
pornographic GIF files for the philosopher's words. So, external hot-links are
very useful, but they have their dangers. Caveat surfer!
As the Web and
similar structures mature, there will undoubtedly be an increasing number of
sites providing stable, "guaranteed" content, and scholars will have less of a
problem. There are, for example, already some refereed online technical
journals. (
8). But the medium does not automatically enforce document stability
in the way print does, so special institutional arrangements will be needed in
contexts where such stability is necessary.
Marginalia and Readers' Comments
Sometimes readers like to
scribble their comments in the margins of printed books, and sometimes
subsequent readers see these comments and may even add their own responses, but
this usually isn't encouraged (particularly with library books) and it isn't a
very effective form of discourse. By contrast, online versions of books can
easily provide for readers to add their comments, and for these comments to be
widely available.
In the online City of Bits, readers can enter
an electronic "agora"
directly from the site's front door, or from the foot of any page of text.
There, they can read the (comments)
that other readers have posted. They can also use a simple form
to add their own comments. And they can even insert hot-links to other sites
that they consider relevant. This agora is organized as a collection of
newsgroups, and provides all the usual features of newsgroup support software.
Over time, then, the online version of City of Bits has become
encrusted with commentary. It has succeeded in provoking, capturing, and making
visible a discourse in a way that is impossible with print. And, in the process,
the seed provided by the original text has grown into a considerably larger and
richer textual structure.
This evolution is fascinating and exciting to
see, but it creates some theoretical connundrums and practical difficulties. The
continually growing, transforming structure is actually the work of many hands,
yet it has my name on it. In the beginning, it was mostly mine, but it becomes
less and less so as time goes on and the online comments accumulate. At what
point does it become inappropriate to say that it is "my" text? When does it
become more reasonable to call it a collective work?
Who bears moral and
legal responsibility for it? Should I treat the agora as a zone in which
complete freedom of speech is permitted, or should I, as the author, take
responsibility for actively moderating and shaping the discussion? Should I
delete blatantly irrelevant and self-serving comments? What if advertisements
are posted? What if a reader were to post comments that I found personally
offensive and insulting? (Am I obliged to provide that person with a platform?)
What if a posting were found to contain slanderous or obscene material, or a
neo-Nazi diatribe? These are not the sorts of questions that arise about
scribbled marginal comments in printed books, but they have been hotly debated
in relation to online newsgroups and bulletin boards. A book becomes a thing of
a different kind when it systematically internalizes and reports back the
discussion that it has provoked, rather than standing distinct, closed, and
aloof from it.
These seem difficult questions, and general answers will
probably have to be worked out through experience and debate. In the case of
City of Bits, the team that maintains the site has taken a rigorous
"hands off" attitude; we occasionally go through and clean out the completely
irrelevant postings that sometimes appear, but we leave everything else there.
Generally, comments so far have been serious and responsible, so we have not
been forced to confront any really troublesome dilemmas. Perhaps we have just
been lucky, though.
Reviews, Mentions, and Translations
Any successful book soon
generates a growing body of thematically related, secondary, and derivative
texts reviews, commentaries, news articles, mentions in other works, and
translations. The City of Bits site keeps a running record of this sort
of material (to the extent that the team can keep up with it) and, where
possible and appropriate, provides links to it.
As it turned out,
City of Bits generated a lot of interest, and quickly received many
reviews in both the specialist and mainstream media. Perhaps naively, we had
hoped that we might add the full texts of all reviews to the site as they
appeared. That would have made accessible another, extremely interesting, layer
of commentary and elaboration. But the world is not quite ready for that; after
a few attempts to secure permissions to reproduce complete reviews online, and
generally getting rebuffed or asked to pay exorbitant fees, we retreated to the
position of posting short
extracts much as they have traditionally been reproduced in jacket
copy and advertisements. In future, though, it may not be so difficult to
achieve our original ambition; when the majority of reviews appear in online
editions of newspapers and magazines, and the like, it will only be necessary to
link to them.
As translation rights have been sold, details on the
forthcoming foreign-language editions have been posted in a Translations
section of the site. When the translations are completed, we will explore
further possibilities. (This will require making new and unusual types of
agreements with the overseas publishers, and it is not yet clear how these will
work out.) For example, we might simply add online texts of the foreign-language
versions to the City of Bits site. We might go further, and provide
structures of cross-linkages among the English and foreign-language versions so
that multilingual readers might conveniently move back and forth a
particularly useful capability where words and phrases do not have very exact
equivalents in other languages, or where there might be ambiguity or debate
about the best way to translate things. Or we might encourage the foreign
publishers to develop their own Web sites for the translations, then build links
to and fro. In the more distant future, it is easy to imagine online books
existing as multilingual, geographically distributed sites in which you are
asked, on entry, what language you want to use-as in American Express cash
machines.
Online Appropriation
In effect, the various external linkages
from the City of Bits site appropriate a vast array of existing textual
fragments and combine them to form a new work something that, because of
the selection and organization that goes into it, is significantly greater than
the sum of its parts. The original City of Bits text, as published on
paper, is just one of these constituent fragments though, to be sure, a
privileged one. (This shifts to a radically new context the old idea, recognized
in intellectual property law, that a collection can be a creative
work.)
This strategy of textual appropriation and collage does not run
into the sorts of intellectual property difficulties that would arise in
creating a large, cross-referenced print collection, since the constituent
fragments are merely pointed to rather than reproduced. The author of an
appropriated text does not lose anything in this way. On the contrary, authors
usually post texts online because they want them to be noticed and read, so it
is an advantage to attract linkages that might channel readers from other texts
and sites.
In sum, an important new literary role has now emerged
that of the link-editor who locates fragments of text online and
combines them into original literary structures by superimposing patterns of
linkages. On a large scale, the operators of Internet guides like Yahoo! play the link-editor role by
selecting and classifying online material and providing convenient
point-and-click access from a topic list. Pedagogues play the game when they
link words in books and articles to online reference works dictionaries,
encyclopedias, and so on. Critical scholars play it when they create structures
of comparisons and contrasts among texts. The City of Bits team
certainly played it when they constructed the online version. And, by now, the
online City of Bits has been appropriated into a great many online
constructions created by others.
When I have discussed this form of
appropriation with other authors, some of them have been greatly disconcerted by
the idea. They do not like the possibility that their work might be used in ways
they cannot control and for purposes that they never intended. (They forget, of
course, that authors have never really had very much control over the uses and
misuses of their published texts. But embedding in online link structures does
make this possibility dramatically explicit.) Others, including myself, are
excited by being able to see with new clarity the evolving roles that their
texts play in ongoing discourses.
Stabilities and Instabilities
As we have now seen, the online
City of Bits has both stable and unstable elements. The core text,
which corresponds to that of the print version, does not change. But the
structure of links that it carries is continually adjusted and extended, the
contents of the externally linked sites evolve, and the accreted structure of
comments, reviews, and translations grows. If I decide to do new print editions,
I expect to add the text of those to the online version, and to preserve the
earlier edition texts as well. Thus any change in the core text will be carried
out in well-defined, modular increments.
A more radical possibility would
be to make continual small changes to the core text to reflect new developments
and to respond immediately to comments and criticisms. (There is no technical
difficulty in doing so.) That way, the text would be kept constantly up to date;
there would be no need to keep using an increasingly obsolete and unsatisfactory
text while waiting for the right moment to put out a complete new edition. But
this would destroy the logical integrity of references within the overall
structure. What if, for example, a reader's comment refers to a specific
paragraph in the core text and that paragraph is subsequently deleted or
significantly altered?
Perhaps the most satisfactory approach would be to
preserve successive versions as incremental changes are made. Some fairly
straightforward software could then automatically relate comments and other
linked material to the appropriate versions. So far, though, we have not had the
energy or the disk space for that.
Whatever the balance between stable
and unstable elements, though, you never read the same text twice. (Heraclitus would
have loved it!) Even the internally stable elements are continually being
recontextualized, and so shift in their meaning, as the huge structure that
embeds them transforms itself. Furthermore-an alarming thought for historians
it is quite impossible to preserve more than a very partial record of the
past states of that transforming structure; it has no distinct boundaries, it is
distributed over many different machines in widely scattered locations, and it
is far too large and complex to back up on tape. The printed book appeared to
give scholars stable, repeatable text modules to work with. Perhaps that was
always a myth. With online books, certainly, that myth is increasingly difficult
to sustain.
The End
Hardback and paperback books eventually go out of print.
Archival libraries selectively perform the function of preserving books after
that point. But what about online books? Since it does take some effort and
resources to keep them around, and even more to keep them growing and changing,
they are likely to have quite limited lives. How long do they stay available
online? What is the electronic equivalent of going out of print? Who is
responsible for long-term archiving?
Answers to these questions are
likely to vary with the type of book, and may change over time as online
publication grows in importance, but I can give a provisional answer for
City of Bits online. I regard it as a kind of extended live performance
in a vast virtual theater. Eventually, that performance will end. The site that
remains will not instantly disappear, but will slowly fade away like an
abandoned stage-set-as link-rot sets in and as additions and updates are no
longer made. As time goes by, there will be fewer and fewer visitors.
In
the end, the City of Bits will be an electronic ruin. Like Troy, it will cease to
function and to live becoming, instead, part of the archaeology of
cyberspace.
