HAYLES, N. Katherine
Postprint. Books and Becoming Computational

Musing, you hold two books, one in your left hand, the other in your right. The left-hand book is a first edition of William Faulkner’s classic novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), for which you paid a staggeringly extravagant sum at a rare-book dealer. The right-hand book is a copy of the same novel that you bought on Amazon for a tiny fraction of that cost. Although you may not know it, the right-hand book was printed by CreateSpace, a digital publishing platform, at a nearby location to ensure you would receive it the next day. […]

N. Katherine Hayles traces the emergence of what she identifies as the postprint condition, exploring how the interweaving of print and digital technologies has changed not only books but also language, authorship, and what it means to be human. [publishers’ note]

Published by Columbia University Press, 2021
Essays / Digital / Book Culture / Media Studies