1. Opening the Book
The Fifth International Conference on the Book
Madrid, Spain 20-22 October, 2007
Spanish National Research Council
Michael A Peters
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2. Investigating „the end of the
book‟
There has been a great deal of
speculative eschatology around the
book—the end of the book, the end of
print culture, and the demise of the
author as well as a kind of messianic
heralding of the new age of the
screen, universal access to information
and learning, and commons-based
cultural production.

3. Opening the book
This presentation begins by
investigating the theology of the book
before discussing one aspect of the
new messianism about e-texts that I
have simply called ‗openness‘—what I
allude to by ‗Opening the Book‘.

4. Structure
1. ‗the end of the book‘ club
2. The concept of ‗the open society‘
3. Open source & open access
4. Open knowledge production systems

5. Not the „end of the book‟
not the ‗end of the book‘ but its radical
decentering in a new electronic
textual system that will involve a set of
changes in all aspects of the ‗culture
of the book‘ including all phases of its
creation, production and consumption
as well as its practices and institutions
of reading and writing.

6. Historical Sociology of Books
Walter Benjamin – 1892 - 1940

7. „The end of the book‟
Walter Benjamin – One-Way Street, 1928
“Just as this time is the antithesis of the Renaissance
in general, it contrasts in particular to the situation in
which the art of printing was discovered. For
whether by coincidence or not, its appearance in
Germany came at a time when the book in the
most eminent sense of the word, the book of books,
had through Luther's translation become the
people's property. Now everything indicates that
the book in this traditional form is nearing its end.”

8. Walter Benjamin‟s analysis
• Mallarmé‘s incorporation of the graphic tensions of the advertisement
in the printed page
• The Dadaists‘ typographical experiments
• ―Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an
autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out onto the street by
advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of
economic chaos. This is the hard schooling of its new form.‖

9. „The death of the author‟
Roland Barthes - 1915–1980

10. „Language speaks, not the
author‟
„The author is a modern figure, a product of
our society insofar as, emerging from the
Middle Ages with English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the
Reformation, it discovered the prestige of
the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the
"human person." It is thus logical that in
literature it should be this positivism, the
epitome and culmination of capitalist
ideology, which has attached the greatest
importance to the "person" of the author.‘
"The Death of the Author" Aspen (1967) Image-Music-Text (1977)

11. The author-function
Michael Foucault – 1926 - 1984

12. Michel Foucault: "What is an
Author?"
‗In dealing with the "author" as a function of discourse, we
must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support
this use and determine its differences from other discourses…
the form of property they have become is of a particular type
whose legal codification was accomplished some years
ago…
the "author-function" is not universal or constant in all
discourse…
this "author-function" is that it is not formed spontaneously
through the simple attribution of a discourse to an individual. It
results from a complex operation whose purpose is to
construct the rational entity we call an author.‘
From Foucault, Michel "What is an Author?", translation Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1977. pp.124-127.

13. „The end of the book‟
Jacques Derrida – 1930 - 2004

14. Logocentrism
In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida equates the
culture of the book with logocentrism, the belief in a
signifier which is both outside of structure, and
hence beyond scrutiny or challenge, and at the
very centre, providing it with a central point of
reference that anchors meaning.
‗The idea of the book, which always refers to a
natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of
writing. It is the encyclopedic protection of theology
and of logocentrism against the disruption of
writing, against its aphoristic energy, and [...]
against difference in general (p. 18)‘

15. End of the printed book
‗The End of the Book, like the ―death of the
author‖, is the conceptual analogue of the
End of the Printed Book. These historical shifts
have been concomitant with, and indeed
have paved the way for, the advent of
electronic hypertext. They signal not simply
the demise of the bookmark industry or relief
from the dangers of papercuts, but a way of
thinking about the way we organize,
conceive and imagine the world in which
we live.‘
Christopher Keep, Tim McLaughlin, Robin Parmar at http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0248.html

16. „The Future of Books‟
Umberto Eco - 1932

17. „Vegetal and mineral memory:
The future of books‟
‗In the course of many interviews I
have been obliged to answer
questions of this sort: "Will the new
electronic media make books
obsolete? Will the Web make literature
obsolete? Will the new hypertextual
civilisation eliminate the very idea of
authorship?"
Lecture at Bibliotheca Alexandrina November 1st 2003 at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/665/bo3.htm

18. The Open Text
‗Before the invention of computers, poets and
narrators dreamt of a totally open text that readers
could infinitely re-compose in different ways. Such
was the idea of Le Livre, as extolled by Mallarmé.
Raymond Queneau also invented a combinatorial
algorithm by virtue of which it was possible to
compose, from a finite set of lines, millions of
poems. In the early sixties, Max Saporta wrote and
published a novel whose pages could be displaced
to compose different stories, and Nanni Balestrini
gave a computer a disconnected list of verses that
the machine combined in different ways to
compose different poems‘

19. Opening the book
There has been a great deal of speculative
eschatology around the book—both the end of the
book, the end of print culture, and the demise of the
author as well as a kind of messianic heralding of
the new age of the screen, universal access to
information and learning, and commons-based
cultural production. This paper begins by
investigating the theology of the book before
discussing one aspect of the new messianism about
e-texts that I have simply called ‗openness‘—what I
allude to by ‗Opening the Book‘.
In: The International Journal of the Book (2007)

20. Eschatology: Theology of the book
‗The theology of the book is about this profound displacement
that has encouraged a range of thinkers to posit an
eschatology that hypothesizes the ‗end of the book‘ as a kind
of trope for the investigation of cultural changes in set of
related practices that accompany the transition from one
economy of writing and reading space to another, from one
centered on the book as a physical object endowed with
certain properties and that develops in different forms over
time to one that that is modeled on the distributed text in open
electronic environments, that is taken up and consumed
differently by a range of active users who remake the text with
each operation. The messianic element in this reading thus
begins to questions the metaphysics of the book and to herald
the metaphysics of the new virtual spaces of the Web and the
Internet in a way that throws into new light practices of
reading and writing as well as the distinction between writers
and readers.‘

21. Roger Chartier 1945-

22. The Order of Discourse
‗Regarding the order of discourse, the electronic
world thus creates a triple rupture: it provides a new
technique for inscribing and disseminating the
written word; it inspires a new relationship with texts;
and it imposes a new form of organization on texts‘
(2003)
‗The death of the reader and the disappearance of
reading tend to be thought of as the inevitable
consequence of the civilisation of screens, of the
triumph of images and electronic communication‘
(2001)

23. The Open Society
• Henri Bergson (1977 orig. 1932) in The Two Sources
of Morality and Religion describes two sources of
morality, one open whose religion is dynamic, the
other closed whose religion is static.
• Karl Popper (1945) in The Open Society and its
Enemies criticizes historicism (Plato, Hegel and
Marx) and provides a defense of the principles of
liberal democracy
• The Open Society Institute (OSI), a foundation
created in 1993 by George Soros, leads to the
Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)

24. The Budapest Open Access
Initiative (BOAI)
‗free availability on the public internet, permitting
any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print,
search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl
them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or
use them for any other lawful purpose, without
financial, legal, or technical barriers other than
those inseparable from gaining access to the
internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction
and distribution, and the only role for copyright in
this domain, should be to give authors control over
the integrity of their work and the right to be
properly acknowledged and cited‘
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml

25. Open Knowledge Production
Systems
• open source
• open platform
• open access
• open content
• open courseware
• open communication
• open archives
• open learning
• open education

26. Open knowledge systems
Open knowledge production is based upon an incremental,
decentralized (and asyncrhonous), and collaborative a
development process that transcends the traditional
proprietary market model. Commons-based peer production is
based on free cooperation, not on the selling of one's labor in
exchange of a wage, nor motivated primarily by profit or for
the exchange value of the resulting product; it is managed
through new modes of peer governance rather than traditional
organizational hierarchies and it is an innovative application of
copyright which creates an information commons and
transcends the limitations attached to both the private (for-
profit) and public (state-based) property forms.
Based on Michel Bauwens‟ P2P Foundation work at the P2P Foundation at http://p2pfoundation.net/3._P2P_in_the_Economic_Sphere

27. Narrative of openness
‗The narrative of openness is tied to the
story of freedom in both its economic
and political forms and as such is also
tied to the future of democracy and to
education‘s role in its promotion.‘

28. From freedom of speech to
freedom to create and distribute
399BC Socrates, 1215 Magna Carta, 1644 Areopagitica
1689 Bill of Rights grants 'freedom of speech in Parliament‗
1734 John Peter Zenger is acquitted of liberal on defense of ‗truth‘
1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Man
1789 The Sedition Act imposed fines for criticizing the government
1791 The First Amendment of the US Bill of Rights guarantees four freedoms: of religion,
speech, the press and the right to assemble
1929 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes
1948 The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
1958 ‗Two Concepts of Liberty‘ Isaiah Berlin
1960 Penguin wins the right to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover
1962 One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich
1989 Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa against Salman Rushdie
1991 The World Wide Web is released
1998 Open source software comes of age
2001 The Patriot Act gives the US government new powers
2004 CERNET2 launched by the China Education and Research Network
2007 Development of complete picture of future of interactive mobile Web applications
2007 Fundamentos Web 2007 conference launched in Spain

29. Openness & freedoms
Openness means
• ‗The freedom to study the work and to
apply knowledge acquired from it;
• The freedom to redistribute copies, in
whole or in part, of the information or
expression;
• The freedom to make improvements or
other changes, and to release
modified copies‘ (OECD, 2007: 35).

30. The Open Book
These are different freedoms from
those that helped define the book and
the culture of the book and represent
another historical stage that we can
call ‗opening the book.‘