Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.

Bertram, Chris, et al. Crooked Timber (2003-present). http://www.crookedtimber.org.

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Random House, 1994.

Bolter, J. David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1991.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Atlantic Monthly. July 1945, 101-08. Online: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush.

Chartier, Roger. “Libraries Without Walls.” Representations 42 (Spring 1993): 38-52.

Coover, Robert. “The End of Books.” The New York Times Book Review (21 June 1992): 1, 23-25.

Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (Summer 1982): 65-83.

Davidson, Cathy, and David Theo Goldberg. “The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age.” Institute for the Future of the Book, January 2007. Online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/HASTAC/learningreport/. Accessed 11 July 2007.

Donaldson, Ian. “The Destruction of the Book.” Book History 1 (1998): 1-10.

Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Again with the Blegging.” Planned Obsolescence (12 July 2007). http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/again-with-the-blegging/.

———. “Blogging: Firstborn Or Second Coming?” Planned Obsolescence (13 July 2007). http://www.plannedobsolescence.net/blogging-firstborn-or-second-coming/.

———. “MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet.” MediaCommons, 29 March 2007. Accessed 11 July 2007. http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/scholarlypublishing/.

Grossman, Lev. “Time's Person of the Year: You.” Time. 13 December 2006. Online: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html. Accessed 11 July 2007.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989.

Holbo, John, et al. The Valve (2005-present). http://www.thevalve.org/go.

In Media Res. MediaCommons, 2006-present. Online: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/.

Joyce, Michael. Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Keep, Christopher. “The Disturbing Liveliness of Machines: Rethinking the Body in Hypertext Theory and Fiction.” In Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. 164-81.

Kernan, Alvin B. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0. Rev., amplified ed., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Lanham, Richard A. “From Book to Screen: Four Recent Studies.” College English 54.2 (Feb. 1992): 199-206.

Lapham, Lewis, ed. Iraq Study Group Report. Institute for the Future of the Book, 2006. Online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/iraqreport/. Accessed 11 July 2007.

---, ed. “The President's Address to the Nation.” Institute for the Future of the Book, January 2007. Online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/iraqspeech/. Accessed 11 July 2007.

Levinson, Paul. The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Lieberman, Mark, et al. Language Log (2003-present). http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/.

Liu, Alan et al. “Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature.” Electronic Liberature Organization, 5 August 2005. Online: http://eliterature.org/pad/bab.html. Accessed 10 July 2007.

Long, Elizabeth. “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action.” In The Ethnography of Reading. Ed. Jonathan Boyarin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 180-211.

Montfort, Nick, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. “Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature.” Electronic Literature Organization, 14 June 2004. Online: http://eliterature.org/pad/afb.html. Accessed 10 July 2007.

Nelson, T. H. “Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate.” In Association for Computing Machinery: Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference. New York: ACM Press, 1965. 84-100.

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 2002.

Owens, Howard. “What We’ve Learned From Blogs — How to Grow Audience.” Media Blog (9 July 2007). http://www.howardowens.com/2007/what-weve-learnd-from-blogs-how-to-grow-audience/.

Price, Leah. “Reading: The State of the Discipline.” Book History 7 (2004): 303-20.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible.” In Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Eds. Jennifer Andersen, and Elizabeth Sauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 42-79.

———. “Textual Studies and the Book.” Unpublished conference paper. Modern Languages Association. Philadelphia, December 2006.

Stephens, Mitchell. “Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness.” Institute for the Future of the Book, December 2006. Online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens/holyofholies/. Accessed 11 July 2007.

Tepper, Michele. “The Rise of Social Software.” netWorker 7.3 (September 2003): 19-23.

Vershbow, Ben. “GAM3R 7H30RY 1.1 is Live!.” if:book (22 May 2006). http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/05/gam3r_7h30ry_will_go_live_toda.html.

———. “Small Steps Toward an N-Dimensional Reading/Writing Space.” if:book (6 December 2006). http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/12/small_steps_toward_an_n-dimensional.html.

Wark, McKenzie. GAM3R 7H30RY. Institute for the Future of the Book, May 2006. Online: http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/. Accessed 11 July 2007.

Young, Jeffrey R. “Books 2.0: Scholars Turn Monographs Into Digital Conversations.” Chronicle of Higher Education. 28 July 2006, A20. Online: http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i47/47a02001.htm.

Moreover, the attempt to imagine such alternatives often results in a profound anti-technological backlash; one might see, for instance, Alvin Kernan or Sven Birkerts, among any number of other such sources.

See as well George Landow’s argument that “hypertext promises to embody and test aspects of theory, particularly those concerning textuality, narrative, and the roles or functions of reader and writer” (2), suggesting hypertext’s more thorough fulfillment of earlier arguments about print-based texts.

There are two obvious points to make here, each of which significantly complicates the assertion above: first, the proprietary publisher, Eastgate, bears most of the responsibility for the stuckness of such early hypertexts, indicating that one of the dangers in translating traditional publishing industry models to the digital realm is precisely the problem of remaindered texts; while a book that has gone out of print, released by a publisher that has gone out of business, remains readable in such research libraries where it may be housed, a digital title that loses currency runs the risk of becoming technologically illegible. As Robert Coover pointed out in the early days of hypertext, “even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived” (Coover). The second point arises in no small part in response to that first: the Electronic Literature Organization has of late put significant energy into the preservation and protection of texts such as these, through its committee for the Preservation, Archiving, and Dissemination of electronic literature. See Montfort and Wardrip-Fruin and Liu et al.

What follows is a series of wholly inadequate attempts to summarize a vast field of work, in the service of a particular point about the social networks involved in reading; please see some of the sources cited for more thorough, and no doubt more accurate, explorations of their arguments.

See Anderson and Habermas. There are certain obvious criticisms to be leveled at both theorists, most notably that the public sphere that they describe somewhat overstates its universality, given that only those admitted to the coffee houses — white men of a certain economic standing — were able to part of that public. It is nonetheless key that the technologies of reading played a crucial role in developing that public’s sense, however faulty, of itself.

See, in addition to Price as cited earlier, (Darnton): “Reading itself has changed over time. It was often done aloud and in groups, or in secret and with an intensity we may not be able to imagine today” (78).

So argued Howard Owens recently on his blog: “Blogs are arguably the first web-native publishing model, so it only makes sense that blogs would provide a template for how to publish online” (Owens), as did Michele Tepper well before that, in the September 2003 issue of netWorker, describing blogs as “perhaps the first native publishing format for the Web” (20). This point always seems to be made with “arguably” inserted, as I have done, which suggests that the idea has managed to enter the conventional wisdom without anyone ever having done an empirical study to back it up. Interestingly, I posed the question of support for such a statement on my own blog, and provoked in return a compelling discussion about what the true value of blogging’s “firstness” would be and about the erasure of Usenet from histories of the digital in the wake of the web. See Fitzpatrick, “Again with the Blegging” and Fitzpatrick, “Blogging.”

See Fitzpatrick, “MediaCommons.”

“Doing the comments this way (next to, not below, the parent posts) came out of a desire to break out of the usual top-down hierarchy of blog-based discussion” (Vershbow, “G4M3R 7H30RY”).

That said, if CommentPress is successful, as I believe it will be, it will be because of the conversations and interactions that it can promote, and the new writing that those interactions can inspire. CommentPress works within an understanding that the chief problem involved in creating the future of the book is not simply placing the words on the screen, but structuring their delivery in an engaging manner; the issue of engagement, moreover, is not simply about locating the text within the technological network, but also, and primarily, about locating it within the social network. These are the problems that developers must focus on in seeking the electronic form that can not just rival but outdo the codex, as a form that invites the reader in, that acknowledges that the reader wants to respond, and that understands all publication as part of an ongoing series of public conversations, conducted in multiple time registers, across multiple texts. Making those conversations as accessible and inviting as possible should be the goal in imagining the textual communications circuit of the future.

This growing demand has spurred the Institute on to further development, working on compiling the various hacks and templates that, to this point, they’ve been tweaking manually into a releasable, documented, open-source theme easily installable and usable with any WordPress installation. CommentPress 0.9, a development release, was first made available to testers on 21 July 2007. The following day, I used my web hosting provider's one-click install function to load a new installation of WordPress, installed and set up the CommentPress theme, loaded in the text of this article, and did a bit of tinkering with formatting and the like, taking this article from a draft Word document to "published" (including, arguably, founding the publisher!) in under three hours. [note: further expansion of this section TK]

Because of the blog-based structure that the theme is built upon, and because of the multiple levels of commenting that it makes available, CommentPress can facilitate the publication and discussion of texts of a wide variety of lengths, and could with some additions to its front-page structure similarly allow for the publication of multiple texts, by individuals or groups of authors. CommentPress could, for instance, be used to structure an electronic journal as easily as a monograph, by linking together individual essays into “issues,” and issues into series. Moreover, the discussion spaces provided by CommentPress could be used by authors who want feedback while a text is in development or by authors who have completed a text and are seeking peer review. Texts published in CommentPress can be linked to one another, and in so doing can use WordPress’s “pingback” feature to create citation indexes. There remain a few other desirable avenues for the project’s future development as well, including true wiki-style versioning, such that the authors of CommentPress texts might continue revising and updating them, while maintaining the availability of the originally published versions within the text’s history. [note: a probable site for future expansion as well]

The Institute followed this with a treatment of President Bush’s televised address to the nation responding to the report, interweaving the transcribed text of the address with streaming video of the speech, opening the content and the delivery both to discussion.

Interestingly, however, the entire Iraq Study Group Report received a total of 92 comments, fewer than did Mitchell Stephens’s much shorter — and arguably much less pressing — paper. The reasons why in no small part have to do with the structure of the two social networks into which the texts were released: Stephens put his paper into CommentPress as a means of presenting it to a working group at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University; this group was organized around the discussion of texts like Stephens’s, and so the technology facilitated the interactions and exchanges they already wanted to have. Lapham’s project, by contrast, brought together what the site referred to as “a quorum of informed sources (historians, generals, politicians both foreign and domestic),” as well as a number of writers and reporters, all of whom had a vested interest in the material, but most of whom were unaccustomed to working either in such a mediated or in such an interactive vein. (In fact, over 1/3 of the comments on the report came from one participant, novelist and political Kevin Baker, who maintains an extensive web presence.) CommentPress, then, is not a panacea; publishing a text through it will not get any randomly selected group talking. It will, however, facilitate discussions among those who want to have them.

Each section of the text likewise allows for more general comments, which can be found by selecting the comment icon next to the section title; all comments that have been made on any section can be read by clicking on the “All Comments” tab above the comment window. Moreover, clicking on the small icon to the right of a commenter’s name highlights the paragraph to which the comment is attached.

The comments Stephens received on the paper — 104 of them — were by and large substantive, and they included a number of technical comments that allowed the Institute to continue developing the templates for publications with this kind of fine-grained commenting ability.

I realized that this questioning that goes on while you read, that that could happen sort of in real time and in a dynamic way.... And best of all would be if readers could talk to each other, and if readers could talk to the author, because the reason for a book is to afford conversation across space and time, and so why shouldn’t some of that conversation take place literally within the book itself? (Young)

Among the projects through which the Institute hopes to facilitate some of that conversation is an adaptation of WordPress’s blogging engine for use in electronic publishing. Their open-source theme, named CommentPress, has its deep origins in a collaboration with McKenzie Wark who, in preparing the manuscript for his 2007 book, Gamer Theory, was persuaded to collaborate with the Institute in putting a draft of the text online. The online version, titled GAM3R 7H30RY (so that Wark could distinguish Google hits mentioning the online text from those mentioning the print book), easily adapted itself to publication through a blogging engine, but Wark and the Institute early expressed an interest in subverting one of the basic structures of the blogging hierarchy: rather than keeping each chunk of his text up top, with comments relegated to a spot further down the screen, Wark and the Institute’s developers collaborated on a design that would place the text and the comments side-by-side, emphasizing the conversational principle that the publication hoped to foster.[10]

G4M3R 7H30RY lent itself to being published in this fashion in part because the text was already “chunked,” written in a hyper-structured, rigidly algorithmic structure, with 9 alphabetically sequential chapters, each containing 25 paragraphs, with a strict 250-word limit per paragraph; as the paragraphs themselves were often aphoristic, many of them stood alone well, and reader comments were thus able to be closely associated with each paragraph of the text. However, the translation of what was originally intended to be a traditional codex book into this nonlinear structure nonetheless created some complications: each paragraph looked a bit more free-standing than it really was; a reader couldn’t simply enter and exit the text at any random point; readers often left questions or comments on early chunks about issues that were addressed in later parts of the text. Moreover, publishing Wark’s text online was extraordinarily labor-intensive, requiring too much manual tweaking to be readily adaptable for more general publishing purposes.

There’s nothing at all revolutionary in this insight; “the network can create virtual connections amongst otherwise isolated individuals!” is no more than the kind of utopian thinking that’s colored internet studies since Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community was first published in 1993. I do not intend to return us to this kind of uncritical technoboosterism by suggesting that community will solve all of the problems of contemporary scholarly publishing, but I do want to argue that understanding the ways that texts circulate within and give rise to communities will be a necessary component of any successful electronic publishing venture. Given that the strength of the network with respect to the circulation of text is precisely its orientation toward the commons, that many can not only read a text individually but also interact with the same text at the same time, developers of textual technologies would do well to think about ways to situate those texts within a community, and to promote communal discussion and debate within those texts’ frames. Simply publishing texts online, finding ways to replicate the structures of the book in digital form, will fail because the network cannot, and should not, replicate the codex; simply moving toward a more hypertextual form of publishing will likewise not work, as hypertext’s real interactivity is limited. As Richard Lanham noted in an early review essay on work in electronic textuality, “Digital electronic writing is a volatile, interactive, nonauthoritative medium which, of itself, alters the whole idea of scholarly originality, research, and production and publication” (Lanham 203) — but such transformations will only succeed if the medium’s interactivity and nonauthoritative structures are fully mobilized. It’s no paradox that my students resist hypertext while embracing Facebook; the generation celebrated by Time magazine as the “person of the year” in late 2006 — “you” — expects that the reader will likewise be allowed to write.

That scholars, and not just students, have a desire for such interaction might be seen in the speedy rise to popularity of academic blogging, and in particular in the success of a range of scholarly group blogs including The Valve in literary studies, Crooked Timber in political philosophy, Cliopatria in history, Language Log in linguistics, and so on. Many scholars feel themselves over-isolated, longing for new modes of collaboration and discussion, and such blogs have enabled a kind of conference-without-walls, in which new ideas and new texts can be discussed in something like real time. Moreover, contrary to the sense of some more curmudgeonly folks that the kinds of casual writing done on scholarly blogs can only detract from one’s ability to produce “serious” work, whether by stealing time or focus, or by encouraging speed at the cost of deliberativeness, in fact, many academic bloggers have argued that their blogging, and the discussions on various blogs, have been productive of more substantive work. By revitalizing discourse among peers, blogs have helped enable a return to the coffee house model of textual circulation.

But this coffee house model still largely revolves around the contemporary equivalent of newspaper and pamphlet publishing, rather than the longer, more deliberative form of the book. One question that remains is whether the library model of the circulation of single-author, long-form texts, meant to be consumed in relative isolation, over longer periods of time, might similarly benefit from the kinds of interaction that blogs produce, and if so, how. The library in such a model would become not simply a repository but instead fully part of a communications circuit, one that facilitates discourse rather than enforcing silence. Many libraries are already seeking ways to create more interaction within their walls; my institution’s library, for instance, hosts a number of lecture series and has a weekly “game night,” each designed to help some group of its users interact not simply with the library’s holdings, but with one another. Patrons who use the library in such a fashion, it is hoped, would be more likely to use the library in traditional ways as well — more likely, for instance, to feel comfortable approaching a research librarian for help with a project.

Given that libraries are already interested in establishing themselves as part of a scholarly discursive network, putting the emphasis in the development of electronic publishing technologies on an individualist sense of the book’s circulation — on the retreat into isolation that accompanies our stereotypical imaginings of the library — threatens to miss the point entirely, ignoring the ways that the book itself has always served as an object of discussion, and thus overlooking the real locus of benefit of liberating the book’s content from the form of the codex. Network interactions and connections of the types provided by blog engines can, I’d argue, revitalize academic discourse not just in its pamphlet/coffee-house mode, but also in its book/library mode, by facilitating discussion of a text, by promoting that discussion within the text’s own frame, and by manifesting the ways that each individual text is, and has always been, in dialogue with numerous texts that have preceded it, and that are yet to come.

Blogs are arguably the first successful web-native mode of electronic publishing,[8] and their rapid spread and relative longevity suggest that their tools might be closely examined for their applicability to a range of other potential digital publishing modes. The structure of a blog of course privileges immediacy — the newest posts appear first on the screen, and older posts quickly fall out of currency, moving down the blog’s front page and eventually falling off it entirely, relegated to the archives. Such a presentist emphasis works at cross purposes with much long-form scholarship, which needs stability and longevity in order to make its points. But, as I’ve argued elsewhere,[9] such scholarship might adopt from blogs their community-oriented structure, in which posts are generally made to elicit comment, and in which responses from other authors produce links on the original posts to which they refer. These commenting and trackback technologies might be usefully appropriated to a number of forms of scholarly publishing, ranging from the article to the long-form monograph, making manifest the recognition that readers of scholarly texts are nearly always themselves authors in other venues.

Texts have thus never really operated in isolation from their readers, and readers have never been fully isolated from one another, but different kinds of textual structures have given rise to and interacted within different kinds of communications circuits. Newspapers and pamphlets, as most famously studied by Jurgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson, developed their influence in close concert with the rise of coffee house culture, in which the events and polemics of the day were discussed and debated, giving rise not simply to a Habermasian sense of the “public sphere,” but to a sense of the public inhabiting that sphere, the “imagined community” of the nation.[6] Books, similarly, moved within a set of social and communal structures that greatly affected their reception and comprehension, including libraries and reading groups, which not only assisted readers in the selection of texts but also provided space for their discussion. That said, the technology of the book, and the literate public with which it interacted, produced a general trend toward individualizing the reader, shifting the predominant mode of reading from a communal reading-aloud to a more isolated, silent mode of consumption.[7]

It is this isolated mode of reading that overwhelmingly dominates our understanding of book-reading today, and particularly the form of reading done by scholars. The library model of textual circulation, once understood to be a communal enterprise, now comes to seem profoundly individualistic: books are checked out and read by one person at a time, in retreat from interaction with the world. Indeed, when we imagine scholarly interactions with the bulk of printed texts today, particularly within the humanities, the primary images that arise are of isolation: individual scholars hunched over separately bound texts, each working individually, whether in their separate offices or even collectively, in the silent reading rooms of the major research libraries. Scholars of course need to read and reflect in relative silence and retreat, in order to understand and process the texts with which they work, as well as to produce more texts from those understandings. But the isolated aspect of this mode of reading has come to dominate our sense of the practice of reading as a whole, and in so doing the scholar has come to partake of the myth of individual genius, in which the great man produces noble ideas wholly from his own intellectual resources. As Walter Ong has suggested,

Writing is a solipsistic operation. I am writing a book which I hope will be read by hundreds of thousands of people, so I must be isolated from everyone. While writing the present book, I have left word that I am ‘out’ for hours and days — so that no one, including persons who will presumably read the book, can interrupt my solitude (100).

What such an understanding of the operation of scholarship ignores, of course, is the ways that the communal lingers in the circuit, if only in submerged ways; the scholar alone in his office with a book is never wholly alone, but is always in conversation with that previous author. Similarly, the products of this scholar’s readings are likewise intended to contribute to an ongoing conversation with the other thinkers in the field. This conversation takes place at an often glacial pace, as years elapse between thought and utterance, in the form of the book’s publication, and between utterance and response, in the form of reviews of or responses to that book, but it is a conversation nonetheless.

The negative response to hypertext for this reason often gets dismissed as a kind of reactionary technophobia among traditionalist English majors, and not without reason; we’ve taught them, and they’ve learned well, to value the organizational strategies of the book, and students of mine who’ve been willing to rough it through the confusions of a text like Gravity’s Rainbow have felt stymied by Afternoon, unable to discern from the text the most basic rules for its comprehension. But I’m unconvinced that the problem that this generation of students has with hypertext is entirely a retrograde one; one of the other issues that they point to, in their complaints about the hypertext form, is feeling manipulated. Hypertext isn’t really interactive, they argue; it only gives the illusion of reader involvement. And certainly only the illusion that the hierarchy of author and reader has been leveled: clicking, they insist, is not the same as writing. In fact, hypertext caters not to the navigational and compositional desires of the reader, but to the thought processes of the author. Hypertext, after all, was originally imagined in Vannevar Bush’s classic essay, “As We May Think,” not as a technology through which readers would encounter a single text, but as a means for researchers to organize their thoughts about multiple texts, and to share those thoughts with other researchers. Similarly, Ted Nelson describes “the original idea” of his Xanadu project as having been the production of “a file for writers and scientists” (84). The “we” doing the thinking in both Bush’s and Nelson’s visions was the author and his descendants, not average readers. Insofar as hypertext attempts in its structure to more accurately replicate the structures and processes of human thought, it is the processes of the author’s thought that are represented, often leaving the reader with the task of determining what the author was thinking — thus effectively reinscribing the author-reader hierarchy at an even higher level. Given this focus on authorial desires, the languishing of Eastgate’s titles in “Classic” mode begins to suggest the possibility that while readers who found themselves compelled by early “interactive fiction” titles such as Zork and Adventure included a number of technologists who produced a range of engines that have kept those texts alive through a wide range of platform changes, few readers felt themselves quite so included in the production of these StorySpace texts as to put their own labor into updating them to contemporary standards.[4]

Experiments in hypertext pointed in the general direction of a digital publishing future, but were finally hampered by these difficulties in readerly engagement, as well as, I would argue, having awakened in readers a desire for fuller participation that hypertext could not itself satisfy. For this reason, I want to suggest that if we are going to make any real headway in bridging the gap between our evident abilities with respect to arranging pixels on screens and the difficulties that remain with organizing texts in digital environments — in moving away from thinking about electronic publishing from a problem revolving around the future of print and instead thinking of it as a problem related to the future of the codex — we need to refocus our attention on a different aspect of the digital network. Enormous amounts of research has been done on the means of situating the text within a technological network — on making text digitally transmissible, comfortably readable onscreen, and so forth. All this is of course necessary, and no doubt a necessary precursor to the problem I want to turn our attention toward: the need to situate the text within a social network, within the community of readers who wish to interact with that text, and with one another through and around that text. This is a particular need within electronic scholarly publishing (and even more so within the humanities), on which I’ll focus much of what follows, as the very purpose of scholarly reading is the discursive exchange and development of ideas amongst peers.