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.
