ebr version 1.0: Winter 1995/96

To introduce an electronicbookreview, in the very medium that is reducing book technology to amuseum piece, is to confront some of the more persistent culturalcontradictions of the past few decades. This is the late age of printwe’re in, when all the books worth saving are being scanned into digitalarchives, and the very conception of the book as a fixed object isgiving way to the hyperreality of letters floating on a screen. Forthose writers who are committed to working in the new electronicenvironments, such a “review” might better be named a “retrospective,” amere scholarly commemoration of a phenomenon that is passing. “The deathof books” has spawned a rather lively academic discourse of its own,following in the wake of post-history, post-structuralism,post-feminism, and the various postmodernisms that have worked toundercut the authority of original authorship. The argument has beenmade that technological change represents a happy “convergence” withdevelopments in literary theory; yet new technologies and media ofreproduction are pervasive enough to have themselves produced thecultural climate that gave rise to the theory. As the critic and mediatheorist William Paulson has argued, there’s a technological subtext tothe declining prestige of authors and literary canons. To bring thatsubtext to the surface will be part of ebr’s agenda.