ABSTRACT
Until recently such a possibility meant exclusively moving into the analogue world of television and video and not, as it has increasingly happened, into the world of digital words and images-into, that is, an information technology comprising computerized text, images, sound, and video stored and read on geographically dispersed computers joined to form networks. In many ways, we have, for better or worse, already moved beyond the book. Even on the crudest, most materialist standard involving financial returns, we no longer find the book at the centre ofx>ur culture as the primary means of recording and disseminating information and entertainment. The sales of books and other printed matter, for centuries the centre of our technology of cultural memory, have now fallen to fourth position behind the sales of television, cinema, and video games. The video game, that child of the digital world, only recently displaced the book in third place on this list.
