From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library. Christian Vandendorpe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. 208 pp.

Text is anything but static as the printed word threatens to flutter off the page. This particular moment in the life of the word is the focus of many a book, dissertation, article, and blog, and it gives us cause to look nostalgically and critically at where we’ve been and where we seem to be headed.

Christian Vandendorpe, a professor of lettres françaises at the University of Ottawa, takes on a very wide and deep subject: how transformations of text and our interaction with it, as the author puts it, “affect every aspect of civilization.” Combining elements of all the above-mentioned forms, he provides what is effectively a crash course in the history of reading. [Read more...]