Although this book focuses on the problems and potentials for electronic
representations of the fundamental materials of document-based knowledge
in literature, similar conditions obtain for representations of works
in music, philosophy, history, the law, and religion. These fields find in
paper documents the primary materials of their research and, as in all
other fields, use documents as repositories of scholarly knowledge. It
would please me if the principles emerging from this study were found
applicable in these other fields as well.
The title, From Gutenberg to Google, came to me in Mainz, Germany,
at the Gutenberg Museum. As I stood looking at copies of the first book
printed from moveable type 500 years ago – its beauty, its endurance – I
had a vision in the form of a question: where, in 500 years, would anyone
stand to look at a museum display of the first electronic book and would
the words ‘‘endurance’’ and ‘‘beauty’’ come to mind? The question may
have a breath-taking answer, though I do not know what it is. Endurance
and beauty were, perhaps, byproducts and not the primary goal of
Gutenberg’s enterprise. The future of electronic editing dawns as clearly
bright to us now as the future of printing must have appeared in the first
decades following 1452 to the scribes employed on the new medium of
print. Other scribes employed in scriptoria continued to produce elegant
manuscripts for over 100 years. No doubt the complex and tedious new
technologies – casting type, composing texts using type-sorts with
reversed letter images and representing an enormous investment of tin
and lead, printing at large presses resembling the tools of oil and wine
manufacturing, and involving so much labor before a single inked
impression appeared on paper – must have seemed excessive to many
scribes who could have copied any number of beautiful pages in half the
time and at a fraction of the expense it took to set up a single page for
print. But when the press began to be worked, hundreds of copies
materialized in less time than it took to speak the text, let alone copy it.