Looking for the spaceless book, an E-publishing archaeology

Abstract

In the reformulation of the ‘publication’ concept after the electric and then electronic revolution, there is a consequent reformulation of the ‘space of publication’ which finally transcends the page and the binding as the insurmountable limits. Here the history of this process is tracked through the first optical attempts to compress the content in order to overcome those limits, conceptually preparing for a more radical technological shift. Foreseen in early science fiction visions, this shift determined by digital and the networked technologies, is dramatically collapsing the publication space towards a dimension close to the infinite, where the published object disappears in the reading machine, in what becomes a mere but sophisticated ‘container’.