Page 103 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

to have some understanding of the interface between the writing, coding and the display. Therefore, for a period of time, I became used to writing with both a code and display window open in the program. Thinking about coding occasionally as I wrote also made me more aware of how my text would appear on a monitor. This was never my concern in the past; prior to publishing on the Internet I focused only on writing the text; the complet- ed text, with images and captions, was turned over to a book designer who determined the appearance of the physical book and all its page openings. As I wrote this on my computer I was amused to be reminded of the prac- tice of the prolific eighteenth-century printer-pornographer, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne, who composed many of his erotic novels directly in type before printing, without any manuscript on paper, leaving no archive tracing the development of his texts. Because of the difficulty of setting type by hand, the simultaneous process of composition and typesetting by Restif was no mean accomplishment. Since I did not archive drafts, and composed for direct publication on the Internet, perhaps unintentionally I fell into Restif’s direct-from-type-to-print tradition, though obviously the subject matter has nothing in common with Restif ’s erotica.52
Some of the best eBooks contain features with different advantages, such as the electronic version of Theodore Gray’s The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe, available since 2010 for the Apple iPad. Valuable enhancements to the electronic edition included the ability to ro- tate objects, the ability to visualize objects in 3-dimensions. Enhancements to digital books, while of course different and considerably more complex in their conception and operation, are analogous to features printing in- troduced to books in the fifteenth century, such as title pages, which rarely existed, or were more appropriately called incipit pages prior to printing. Because manuscripts were frequently not paginated, or pagination varied in
52 For a very enjoyable, though relatively slow-moving, cinematic account of Restif de la Bretonne see the 1982 film “La nuit de Varennes,” in which Restif was portrayed by Jean-Louis Barrault and the aging Giacomo Casanova was inimitably portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni.
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