Apps to read and reading Apps: About the book and other confluent textual experiences.

Abstract

This paper addresses the coexistence of the different material formats of books (emerging and classical) from a sociological perspective, trying to argue that textual practices, devices and digital applications available to users are enabling a rearticulation of the book as an object, and some other written content, that surrounds them with new mediations. In addition, we make a brief review of some key points in the evolution of the technologies used to copy textual pieces and try to explain that in the recreation of shared routines and senses is where the future of the book may be establishing itself, so it is not appropriate to simply address the agency in a technology (such as the printing press before or Internet nowadays) unless we understand the technology as an contingency with a strong social component, not only as purely technical innovation.
Apparently, we live in a time of transition in which several strategies are being developed by different corporations in order to impose their own conceptions of readings and books among the others. Either way, it is not questionable that also the attempts to capture the legal condition of the book may have a performative desire. Therefore, the technological environment of the book is suffering a kind of reorganization in several locations, where new and old elements try to fit themselves within variant levels of conflict.