Page 41 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

definition, which in theory could encompass a work of any length. It may certainly be described as a container for information that is designed for distribution over the Internet and communication by reading, and even, if by some stroke of our imagination, the Wikipedia could be issued in an enormous set of physical codices, following Kilgour’s definition, those indi- vidual codices would be transportable, and the entire set of who knows how many volumes could be transported in a series of semi-trailers or railroad cars.18 However, if we require a static or finished text for a work to be called a book, the Wikipedia, which is constantly being revised, improved and expanded by an online group of over 100,000 volunteers, cannot be called a book. You might ask whether selections from the Wikipedia copied off the website on a given date could be published as a book. Because everything in the Wikipedia is made available free of copyright in theory this would be possible, and it has probably been done more than once, though I have not found the specific bibliographical references. Paradoxically, if we were thinking only of physical codices in defining the concept of the book, a work the size of the Wikipedia would probably have been unimaginable, and, of course, if it had to be written in the traditional methods, by hand or by typewriter, on paper, by an imaginary team of typists passing paper back and forth, it could never have reached its current form within a century or even a millennium, let alone a decade.
If length does not factor into our definition, brief documents may also be considered digital books or printed books, just as we sometimes count printed pamphlets and short codices or ancient papyri as books, even if some of these books have survived in fragmentary form. This means that groups of blog entries, or even SMS text messages, may be considered books; I ad- mit that including text messages with all their abbreviations and less than literate language seems to stretch the definition of the book about as far as it can go! Would we more accurately characterize them as graffiti? In De-
18 In 2014 a scheme was floated to publish the Wikipedia in a single set of 1000 physical volumes, featuring more than 4 million articles on over a million printed pages. Needless to say, this did not come to fruition.
41