It’s easy to forget these things, so here’s the description for the electronic “hypertext edition” of rhetorician Richard Lanham’s collection of essays, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. As Publishers Weekly wrote, “And, yes, the book is available in electronic form; as the first in the Chicago Expanded Book series, there will be a hypertext edition, shipped on 1.4 MB high-density floppy disks.”
The Electronic Word is also available as a Chicago Expanded Book for your Macintosh®. This hypertext edition allows readers to move freely through the text, marking “pages,” annotating passages, searching words and phrases, and immediately accessing annotations, which have been enhanced for this edition. In a special prefatory essay, Lanham introduces the features of this electronic edition and gives a vividly applied critique of this dynamic new edition.
That’s almost twenty years ago. Everything and nothing has changed.
Comments
Warren
What has changed is the ease which electronic books are accessed. In 95, you needed a desktop personal computer of some sort. The Success of the Kindle Ereader and the rise of the mobile market has made reading these books much easier. That is the big change, not how they look or are produced.
Katie King
yep, have it right here on the shelf still.