What is a book? Is it a coherent, unified discourse, or an anthology of fragments and excerpts? The digitization of the objects of written culture that are still ours - the book, but also the magazine and the newspaper - forces us to revisit this question. It seems to me that the key lies in the profound transformation of the relationship between the part and the whole. Until today, at least, in the electronic world, it's the same illuminated surface of the computer screen that gives us texts to read - all texts, whatever their genre or function. The relationship that, in all previous written cultures, closely linked objects, genres and uses is thus broken. It is this relationship that organizes the immediately perceived differences between different types of printed publications and the expectations of their readers, guided in the order or disorder of discourse by the very materiality of the objects that carry them. And it is this same relationship that makes the coherence of works visible, imposing the perception of the textual entity, even on those who only wish to read a few pages. Conversely, in the world of digital textuality, discourses are no longer inscribed in objects that enable them to be classified, hierarchized and recognized in their own right. It's a world of decontextualized fragments, juxtaposed and indefinitely recomposable, with no need or desire to understand the relationship that inscribes them in the work from which they were extracted.
It will be objected that this has always been the case and that, as we have seen, written culture has been largely and enduringly constructed from collections of extracts, anthologies of commonplaces and selected pieces. That's true. But in print culture, the dismemberment of writings is accompanied by its opposite: their circulation in forms that respect their integrity and, sometimes, bring them together in "works", complete or otherwise. What's more, in the book itself, fragments are necessarily, materially, related to a textual totality, recognizable as such. This is no longer the case in the digital world, and this is not the least of the challenges it poses to the categories that used to govern the relationship between books, texts and works, designated, thought out and appropriated in their singularity and coherence.
