ABSTRACT
This chapter explains an important aspect of contemporary digital cultures and network societies is the transfer of our 'cultural archive' to digital, online formats and to the language of new media. It has made an overwhelming number of books and manuscripts accessible as electronic texts, or as 'electronic representations of print literature'. It focuses on the bibliographical codes of a digital text, rather than its iterable, lexical codes which are what usually come to mind when one hears the word. Text on IT and informatics, tourism, music, as well as bibliographies, photos and primitive computer art, humor and anecdotes, and even more current material such as news bulletins and lists of TV programs. The computer in Illinois on which Project Gutenberg was created was included in the early 1970s as one of the nodes of the ARPANET, the decentralized network structure of package-switching invented some years earlier, which eventually became the internet organized along a scale of bookness.
