Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis. Jaargang 8.

Het kompt altemael aen op het distribuweeren

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Adriaan van der Weel
The communications circuit revisited¹

As we enter the twenty-first century, the spread of internet has already conclusively shown that digital transmission of texts is here to stay. Indeed, its significance is only set to rise. Robert Darnton's communications circuit² is a very useful model to study the interaction between the many agents involved in the transmission of texts through society. As Darnton has suggested, ‘With minor adjustments, it should apply to all periods in the history of the printed book’.³ It will be instructive to see how the model is equipped to deal with a period that its maker had not intended it to serve. For one thing, when Darnton first proposed his model the internet had not yet established itself as the popular medium for textual transmission it has since become. For another, it is by no means a foregone

The communications circuit

1 This paper was originally delivered at the sharp conference, Mainz, July 2000.

2 R. Darnton, ‘What is the history of books?’, in: Daedalus, Summer 1982, 65-83; repr. in: R. Darnton, The kiss of Lamourette. Reflections in cultural history, 107-115, 112. I am grateful to the author for his permission to reproduce the diagram here.

3 Darnton, The kiss of Lamourette, 111-113.

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conclusion that book historians should want to study the internet as another means of textual transmission - if for no better reason than that it begs the question how far to stretch the meaning of the term ‘text’. On the internet, it includes still and moving images, speech, shopping transactions, music: anything in fact that can travel in the form of bits.⁴ In this paper I should like to examine the internet as a medium for textual transmission, and to use Darnton's communications circuit as a conceptual model, to prevent an exploration of analogies from degenerating into an incoherent list of chance observations.

While I should like to use Darnton's basic concept, instead of suggesting all sorts of adjustments to his well-established model, I should like to start from scratch and sketch a number of versions of the model that stress the conditions prevailing at a particular time rather than attempting to present a single model to fit all times. ‘Sketch’ is the operative word here. I trust that the reader will show some forbearance while I concentrate on major historical developments with no apparent concern for subtleties.

The first version schematises some of the economic conditions that prevailed when the printing press first became established as the chief instrument for textual transmission. Scheme A shows a number of challenges that presented themselves to the early printers:

The key areas to discuss here are production, marketing, and distribution. Contrary to the world of manuscript reproduction, which required a limited up-front investment, since production took place in response to known demand, printing required a considerable investment in paper and labour (in addition to the original investment in the basic equipment). The challenge was to create a return on the money invested when books sold slowly. While in manuscript production the buyer was usually a known quantity, printing offered the challenge of matching the much larger supply with a demand that was harder to locate, even if potential buyers were sure to exist. Today we call the more or less methodical way to meet this challenge ‘marketing’. In its crudest form, marketing is precisely that: estimating whether the publisher will be capable of reaching these potential buyers in sufficient numbers to make the publication worth his while and devising strategies to actually

4 Cf. D.F. McKenzie's definition of ‘texts’ in his Panizzi lecture ‘The book as an expressive form’, in: Bibliography and the sociology of texts. London 1986. (The Panizzi lectures 1985), 5. I shall return to this essay later.

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reach them. Distribution of print was of necessity less local than that of manuscripts. The distribution challenge involved the exigencies of physical transportation (with factors such as geographical distance and geopolitical impediments). It was met in part by the creation of a network of middlemen: wholesale agents and fellow printer-booksellers.

Over time, the situation changed. Looking at the second half of the twentieth century, we find that the effects of the existing challenges have been mitigated in various ways. This may be schematically represented thus:

By this time, production costs have come down spectacularly as the result of mechanisation, improved techniques, cheaper materials (especially paper), thus vastly reducing book prices and investment levels. (The latter also as a result of the reduced turnaround time for a printrun.) Geographical and geopolitical factors in transportation have slowly diminished in significance over time. Although this was less as a result of developments within the book trade itself than as a result of the expanding economy and infrastructure at large, the nett result is a vast reduction of the physical transportation challenge in book distribution. This development was accompanied by the phenomenal spread of literacy, vastly increasing the number of potential buyers in the local market. This enabled the booktrade to become more local, and thus reduced the relative importance of the transportation cost factor even further. In fact, the entire book distribution infrastructure is now a known quantity, whose significance has been reduced to a percentage of the retail price: a high and unavoidable, but predictable expense. Obviously the same factors that have minimised the distribution challenge have reduced the marketing challenge. With the growing size of the local market, and the ever-increasing general understanding we have of people's media use (and consumption patterns in general), marketing has become a great deal more mechanical. It may never become a predictable factor in the same way as distribution, but at least it is now a familiar concept. In addition, a wide variety of resources have been developed for matching supply with demand, such as catalogues, advertising, bibliographies and so on.

While some of the early challenges have been mitigated by various historical developments, at the same time new challenges have presented themselves, and other developments magnify existing challenges. This results in the following version of the Darnton model:

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At the same time as marketing went through a process of simplification and streamlining, it became more complex as a result of the gradual change from a demand-driven to a supply-driven book trade economy. As both the title production and the number of potential buyers exploded in the nineteenth century, matching supply with demand has become a greater challenge. The widespread tendency of book trade specialisation in the nineteenth century was one way to counter the effects of this challenge. The printer ceased to sell the books he prints for his own risk, for he became a mere middleman to that party we now call the publisher, who was a new appearance on the scene. This publisher has had to deal with the professionalisation of authorship. Authors have, as time goes by, become increasingly interested in direct financial rewards (as against the indirect rewards of patronage or remuneration in copies or no remuneration at all of earlier times). Not coincidentally, the notion of intellectual property developed to become a major issue.

Of course we can decide that the printer of the incunable period in many respects resembles what we now call a publisher, and we may call him one. If we do so, we can see that while some of the challenges facing the publisher have changed dramatically, there are some that have essentially remained the same from early days when he was still primarily a printer. So by what characteristics may we define the function of the publisher? A definition such as that given by Glaister's glossary of the book is remarkably unhelpful:

publisher: a person or a company in business to issue for sale to the public through booksellers books, periodicals, music, maps, etc. In the 16th century London trade the licence to print a work was assigned to a printer who was, by implication, the publisher of it, though sometimes in association with sponsors. Later in the same century bookseller-publishers became more influential and commissioned printers to work for them. Publishing as a business separate from bookselling dates from the early 19th century. See F.A. Mumby & I. Norrie, Publishing and bookselling, 5th ed., Cape, 1974; and Sir Stanley Unwin, The truth about publishing, 8th ed., George Allen & Unwin, 1976.⁵

Taking our cue from the constants in our discussion so far, it makes sense to add the publisher's concern with investment in the production of books: publishing always involves tying up money in a less liquid form. Secondly, in order to recoup his invest-

5 Glaister's glossary of the book. 2nd edn. London (etc.) 1979.

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ment, the publisher is responsible for selling the books, whether this is to the reader/buyer or to booksellers. So distribution for sale is an ongoing concern, which in turn implies the need for marketing. Certainly today's publisher would still regard these three concerns as central - though I think the definition will bear further elaboration. Notably, the publisher's relationship to the author has not yet received any attention.

In order to clarify that relationship I think it will be helpful if we first look at what the internet as a medium for the dissemination of text is capable of offering by way of a solution to the challenges that these concerns, which we have identified as the core of publishing, present to publishers.

Electronic text has the amazing characteristics that the original can be multiplied without limit, without loss of quality and at negligible cost. If an electronic text is available on a network of linked computers (such as the internet), such multiplication can, in addition, take place over any distance at the same negligible cost. Just to look at a text being made available elsewhere on the internet is to make a faithful and instant electronic copy of it locally, at no cost to speak of.⁶ In terms of the publisher's concerns which we just discussed the internet thus offers both a large part of production (viz. multiplication) and distribution at negligible cost.

A communication circuit for the digital transmission of conventional ‘text’ (the sort that used to be transmitted by means of print) in the internet era could be schematically presented as follows:

In contrast with the production of printed books, digital production for publication on the internet does not involve multiplication, but only the editorial and formatting tasks. Multiplication is done by the call production and distribution can in the case of the internet both be minimised, this reduces the publisher's investment to a much lower level than in the case of print. (We are left with sales, to which we shall return.)

Having studied some of the implications of this scheme of things, we may at this point recall George Bernhard Shaw's diatribe against publishers:

6 This does not take into account the necessary investment in hardware. In Western countries we tend to take this for granted, but it remains a significant economic issue in large parts of the world. Similarly, this article abstracts from such issues as political control and other forms of censorship.

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I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature. All that is necessary in the production of a book is an author and a bookseller, without any intermediate parasite.⁷

Like some other Victorian authors, notably Ruskin, Shaw of course became a well-known self-publisher. But with the help of the internet the Shaws of this world can do even better. Since anyone who joins an Internet Service Provider to gain access to the internet is almost automatically presented with a quota of disk space sufficient to host as many novels as even the most prolific writer could produce in a lifetime, nothing is easier for an author than to circumvent both the publisher and the bookseller. The possibility results in the following variation on the communications circuit:

This is much more than even G.B. Shaw could have hoped for. Using the internet, today's author can circumvent the publisher, the printer, the distributor and the bookseller, as some adventurous people have shown.

The internet is thus capable, by its low cost and easy access, of ‘democratising’ - in the true sense of bringing to ordinary people - the distribution of recorded text (and of further democratising production). It is perhaps useful to place this democratising characteristic of the internet as a medium in a longer perspective. Looking at the production-distribution-consumption chain, we can identify two major democratising developments that took place earlier in the history of the book:

1 In the field of consumption: the tremendous increase in literacy in the nineteenth century, joined with much lower production costs, which caused books to come within reach of everyone desirous to read;
2 In the field of production: the widespread use of offset lithography from the 1970s, which spelled the end of the monopoly of the typesetting and printing trades and enabled the reproduction of camera-ready copy produced with the crudest of means (it was followed twenty years later by the technical - if not necessarily typographical - sophistication of DeskTop Publishing).

7 Bernard Shaw, in a letter of 1895, quoted in: R. Findlater (ed.), Author! Author!. London 1984, 104.

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The simplified communications circuit is not only a possible scenario, but for a great number of texts it is already in operation. Take, for example, Project Gutenberg in all its national guises, but the same goes for many out-of-copyright texts (and - legally or illegally - quite a number of copyright texts). However, these texts without any physical substance have a problematic side to them. Along with the physical book we have lost in electronic texts the identical copy with identical pages in unchanging form that we have come to rely on for scholarly use.⁸ Whatever their advantages may be, ‘e-texts’ are unstable in form, in content, and even in existence. They may vanish without warning from one moment to the next. The use of this sort of texts is for finding passages, for computer manipulation (indexing, concordancing, matching, cutting and pasting text for quotation, etcetera). And there is, as we shall see, also the possibility of using such texts in an e-book device.

Not only are there these drawbacks, but there are also numerous texts for which a communications circuit without the intervention of a publisher is an unlikely scenario. This applies to most texts within copyright, and many if not most new texts being written. We might single out two classes of texts, both written by categories of authors who aspire to living off the proceeds of their labour: literary and scholarly works. For these, the shortened communication circuit is not feasible.

Not that it is not possible for a young poet to place his texts on the internet and wait for readers to come and find his poetry, and even to set up a system that could charge the prospective reader for the pleasure of reading it. The crucial question is, though, why would a prospective reader pay for the opportunity of reading a volume of poetry by an unknown author? The answer, generally, is: not because he is a promising and deserving young man, but because a publisher has decided to invest a sum of money in the publication of it. Placing a volume of poetry on a web site may theoretically present an easy road to publication: it is hardly going to attract large numbers of paying readers - or even readers at all, for how will they find his work among the so many billion web pages on offer? If Stephen King was an unknown young poet rather than a blockbuster author, he would have been a good deal less successful in his recent self-publishing adventures, and would not have had much cause for calling himself ‘Big Publishing's worst nightmare’.⁹

At first sight it would appear a little more likely that a scholar would place his monograph on thirteenth-century French regional stained glass¹⁰ on his institution's web site and consider it published. On his institution's web site he stands a reasonable chance of the book being found, and he is after all only interested in his monograph being read, discussed and cited. He earns his money from his tenure, so he can

8 Adobe's Portable Document Format (.pdf) offers a solution to this problem, at the cost of another problem, often succinctly paraphrased by the question ‘Who owns your data?’: .pdf files are dependent on proprietary software for their continued readability.

9 At http://www.stephenking.com/download.html (September 2000).

10 The example is from R. Darnton's account on his term on the editorial board of Princeton University Press, ‘Publishing. A survival strategy for academic authors’, in: Idem, The kiss of Lamourette, 94-103.

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dispense with the charging system, for he is not interested in selling copies. The crucial question here is, why would the university pay his tenure? The answer is: not because he has written a book, which can be read on the internet, but because it was good enough for it to have been found worthy of being published by a reputable publisher.

In both these categories of text a publisher can be seen to perform, in addition to the tasks of investing in the production of books, distributing books for sale and marketing of books, the essential task of selecting the books to be published. Uncanonical texts have no automatic status, and have yet to be ‘filtered’. This important task of the publisher, I would suggest, comes close to defining his relationship to the author, which was mentioned earlier.

In retrospect, it is possible to recognise that the role of the publisher has been edging in that direction for a long time. Especially since the nineteenth century the publisher's role as a gatekeeper - to guarantee quality - has gained increasing significance. Not that the publisher necessarily performs that role consciously: for him selection is primarily connected with the decision what to invest his name and money in; selection is merely the unintended corollary.

Through the selection task of publisher (and bookseller),¹¹ paradoxically the accessibility of texts is increased as well as diminished. As well as selecting on saleability (both publisher and bookseller will choose what they think a sufficient number of people would actually pay money to read), they create order in what is published, for example through the nature of their imprint.

So for the benefit of such cases as poets and scholars - but the same goes for the majority of authors - the publisher should be brought back in, demanding a return to scheme D:

But even though we have found that the publisher is in dispensable for many, even most, categories of text - demolishing the Shavian utopia that seemed for a moment so tantalisingly close - what remains in this scenario are the possible advantages of low-cost production and distribution - if, that is, we can solve the problems associated with the electronic form of the book.

The internet is a new medium, and it is difficult to predict how its economy will develop, but we can make a few informed guesses at how these possible advantages in

11 Reviewing, too could be argued to be a form of gatekeeping that increases accessibility by raising public awareness of the existence of certain titles.

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cheap production and distribution may be exploited by publishers.¹² At this moment there are two likely avenues that publishers might pursue. One is the e-book direction, and the other printing on demand (P.o.D.). Both are, incidentally, already practised in a limited way.¹³

The e-book option entails an all-electronic solution, whereby the buyer downloads a text from the publisher's site to his e-book. Some of the problems inherent in electronic texts will be solved, for example by the fact that the publisher safeguards the continued existence of the text (in which he has a vested interest) by maintaining a database of texts (now often called a ‘textbase’) on the internet. In the e-book scenario the reader buys a little gadget to read the book he has purchased. (Current e-book devices cannot hold the proverbial candle to a real book yet, but that will get better.)

The printing on demand option could entail the electronic download of the text of a book from the publisher's internet site or virtual bookshop to a local printing device, which could be located in the equivalent of today's bookshop, or a copyshop, or in a supermarket, where a fully fledged printed book, complete with full-colour cover, could be picked up. This scenario offers decentralised production, tailored to the exact demand, obviating distribution costs and bringing investment levels down virtually to the proportions of the manuscript period. It is also capable of solving all of the problems inherent in electronic texts listed above, for the buyer will own an old-fashioned book.

Both scenarios hold out the promise of lower investment in production and distribution, and thus cheaper books. (Though the reality so far is that electronic books sell for a price only marginally lower than that of ordinary books.)¹⁴ And significantly, the two scenarios are not only fully compatible, they are fully complementary: the same electronic source text can be downloaded to an e-book device and remain virtual for the entire transmission circuit, and it can be downloaded to a remote printer for a physical incarnation. Video recorders are often designated as ‘time-shifting devices’ by media moguls. By analogy, the use of the internet in publishing could be called one huge ‘place-shifting device’.

We have so far concentrated on the low-cost production and distribution potential offered by the digital transmission of text over the internet. In addition, the use of meta information will greatly aid the task of matching supply with demand. ‘Metadata’ is the concept of adding information about information, comparable to the way a library record gives information about a book that may be found in a particular library. The difference in the digital environment is that the metadata are actually

12 It may be objected that the cost of developing and maintaining websites is too high to speak of ‘cheap production and distribution’. This may be true in the very short term, as publishers are making the necessary adjustments. The real savings should become apparent soon.

13 A third, paid access to web sites, might well become feasible for especially shorter texts as digital payment of small sums becomes easier. It is outside the scope of this article to discuss the internet as a distribution channel for conventional printed books through e-commerce.

14 The economics of the two systems are a little different in that P.o.D. books carry the cost of material production per copy, while e-books require a (modest) up-front investment in hardware.

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part of the document to which they pertain. Metadata may be indexed by search engines, and they can make a crucial contribution to making information traceable on the internet. The judicious use of metadata thus offers a great potential for publishers' marketing efforts.

Once these internet scenarios are implemented on any significant scale they could place very different emphasis in our definition of what a publisher does. They would place a great deal less emphasis on investment, and must therefore place proportionally more emphasis on gatekeeping, in the form of selection. But we have already observed that the publisher carries out his selection function not as a conscious task in its own right, but as the natural consequence of the investment he makes. And if the investment is minimised, what basis remains for his selection task?

There is something strange about the phenomenon of electronic textual transmission, for example in respect of the possibility to keep making limitless copies without loss of quality and at so little cost. Conventional economic thinking has taught us that without scarcity, things have no value. The ‘old economy’ has always concentrated on making more units per product at a lower unit cost than the competition: the achievement of economies of scale. In the ‘new economy’ the emphasis lies elsewhere: for example on innovation and new ideas. In the case of text, electronic transmission (especially via the internet) has made the conventional concept of scarcity largely meaningless. Something is either accessible, in which case it can be multiplied without limit, without loss of quality and at negligible cost, or it is not accessible. Scarcity consists solely in limited accessibility, not in the finite availability of produced items. So at the very least the price-making process, which is traditionally based on material scarcity (the finiteness of material availability) must change, substituting an artificial finiteness of access. But perhaps the economic rules themselves will need to change as a result.

I have drawn a fairly sharp distinction for publication on the internet between texts in the public domain on the one hand and texts designed for the exploitation of the intellectual property rights that reside in them on the other. We can now look back and observe in retrospect the strong parallels with the incunable period. Most of the earliest printings concerned books that might be said to have been in the public domain. It took time for the more speculative entrepreneurial climate to develop in which printers and contemporary living authors could find each other. Initially, authors were not rushing to be published in print.¹⁵ Printers were often hard put to find texts to print, and turned to editing and translating existing ones. Gheraert Leeu, for

15 H. Pleij, ‘Literatuur en drukpers. De eerste vijftig jaar’, in: Nederlandse literatuur van de late Middeleeuwen. Utrecht 1990, 137-57. Pleij, who has done much to chart the movement into print of Low Countries literature of the late Middle Ages, suggests that this tendency was less pronounced for southern Europe (France and Italy). See his ‘De betekenis van de beginnende drukpers voor de ontwikkeling van de Nederlandse literatuur in Noord en Zuid’, in: Spektator 21 (1992), 227-263. It would be fascinating to see the results of a more wide-ranging survey, comparing literature with other genres, and comparing the situation in the Low Countries to that in other parts of Europe.

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example, prepared safe popular vernacular editions of classic texts, in prose rather than verse translations, aimed at the new readership for print (e.g., his prose edition of Reinaert de Vos of 1479, translated by Caxton and published in England in 1481).¹⁶ Thomas van der Noot in Brussels was particularly daring in his exploration of the opportunities offered by the new medium, actively requesting from authors he knew copy of a kind he suspected to be commercially viable.¹⁷ In all these cases, the initiative for publication lay with the printers.

It can thus be observed that the impetus for developing the new medium came from the ‘owners’: the printer-publishers. Similarly, we can see that the original ‘owners’ of the internet - which after the military was the scholarly community - grasped the new medium to do precisely the same: they made available cheap (free) editions of everything that was in the public domain: the canon. It will take time for an economy (or economies) of the digital text to develop. Barring exceptions like Stephen King, authors who are trying to make money from their work are also not rushing to publish their work on the internet - yet. But in the same way as authors had to discover the economy of print, so, with the help of internet-entrepreneurs, authors will eventually discover the economy of the internet.

Where the comparison breaks down is in the fact that contemporary scholars did not have to bring the canon to the digital medium in an entrepreneurial spirit: they made their money in tenured positions at the universities. This focuses on the very different economy that the internet is still subject to today. The internet has its roots in a not-for profit environment, usually succinctly paraphrased by the ‘information wants to be free’ slogan. We do not know for how much longer. It is only recently that commerce has begun to take a firm grip on the internet, and the way its economy might develop is in the lap of the gods. But certainly the economic basis for information transmitted over the internet is a very different one from the one that governs the print world, as we have just seen, and it is conducive to the ‘information wants to be free’ spirit.

The print medium has often, for shorter or longer periods in its history, harboured exciting possibilities, such as stereotyping, which was first developed a long time before it became economically feasible until the twentieth century.¹⁸ Or take offset printing, which was first practised as early as 1875, almost as soon as the invention of the rotary press had joined that of lithography and photography¹⁹ but did not be-

16 See P.J.A. Franssen, ‘17 augustus 1479: Gerard Leeu voltooit te Gouda het drukken van Die hystorie van Reynaert die vos’, in: M.A. Schenkeveld-van der Dussen [e.a.] (ed.), Nederlandse literatuur. Een geschiedenis. Groningen 1993, 109-115.

17 Pleij, ‘Literatuur en drukpers’, 236-237. I am indebted to my colleague Berry Dongelmans at Leiden University for pointing me to examples in this section.

18 Philip Gaskell credits Johann Muller, a German pastor living in the Netherlands, with the invention in the early eighteenth century: A new introduction to bibliography. Oxford 1985, 201, and even earlier dates have been suggested. See K. Gnirrep, ‘Standing type or stereoype in the seventeenth century’, in: Quaerendo 27 (1997), 19-45.

19 See M. Twyman, Printing 1770-1970. An illustrated history of its development and uses in England. London 1970, 57.

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come the dominant printing method till the late 1970s, when photographic typesetting had been perfected, enabling the convenient origination of two-dimensional type. For all we know, it still harbours possibilities that no one has yet realised. But back in the early days of print one of these possibilities was also the speculative entrepreneurial exploitation of the medium, which needed to be developed in the course of the first century of printing.

Another of these dormant promises was that of the rise of the professional author, whose success could be made in his own lifetime as a result of the selection practised by the publisher. One of these professional authors was Shaw, who later in his life was much milder about publishers than he was when he wrote the passage quoted above, actually conceding that ‘the wonder is that the publishers do so much to keep up the prestige of literature... at their own cost when trash would pay them better.’²⁰ And he had ample occasion to be grateful to them, despite the experience of having sixty or so publishers in turn reject his novels.²¹ When Swan Sonnenschein (whose list later became part of Allen & Unwin) after publishing a novel by Shaw suggested that ‘the author would do better to write plays’²² we can see that crucial role of selection at work.

However, if the function of the publisher has been narrowed down to that of a gatekeeper, is it not possible that this is a too narrow basis? If it requires so little material investment, would it not be easy for that function to be taken over by another party? Take the case of scholarly publishing, where the real gatekeepers are not the publishers, but the scholar's peers, who already perform their task free of charge anyway. Not only that, but the mechanism through which scholars benefit from being published is not that they get paid royalties, but that they get promoted. In other words, the gatekeeping function in scholarly publishing could well be one-way: keeping bad scholarship out of the door, while readers could be let in free of charge - the more the merrier, in fact. In these circumstances, what would stop a group of scholars setting up their own publishing house? This would again provide a parallel with the early days of print, when the ‘owners’ of the medium became the first entrepreneurs by editing, or even writing, new kinds of books for a new reading public. The answer of course is: nothing, at least in principle, and it is actually happening. In practice, the slow adjustment to the new economy and the new way of thinking it necessitates is still a barrier. But this is certainly going to change.

20 Quoted in Findlater, Author! Author!, 40.

21 See H. Pearson, Bernhard Shaw. A biography. London 1987, 59.

22 Quoted in: I. Norrie (ed.), Mumby's publishing and bookselling in the twentieth century. London 1982, 51.

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Conclusions: ‘The influence of Joyce on Sterne’²³

In order to try and understand the media revolution that we are witnessing at this moment, there are many exciting ways in which we can delve deeply into the history of the book to study the changes that various inventions in the field of book production have wrought. Conversely, I hope I have illustrated that by observing the phenomena that are occurrring in front of our eyes at this very moment we can gain a fresh perspective on many historical phenomena.

Don McKenzie regards bibliography as a discipline that ‘studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception’. In the first of his Panizzi lectures he states that he defines ‘texts’ to include verbal, visual, oral and numeric data, in the form of maps, prints, and music, of archives of recorded sound, of films, videos, and any computer-stored information, everything in fact from epigraphy to the latest forms of discography.

And he goes on to say that ‘There is no evading the challenge which those new forms have created.’²⁴ That is a challenge indeed and we may prefer not to widen our discipline quite so far as that. But he rightly intimates that electronic developments in textual transmission must be regarded as a natural extension of book history.

I would concur with him and suggest that we should not evade the challenge of considering the history of the book as a continuum from manuscript to electronic textual transmission, in an intellectual history context. Just as Robert Darnton suggests that book history should be interdisciplinary in order for the ‘parts’ of individual research to ‘take on their full significance’,²⁵ a case can (and, I believe, must) be made for book history in the narrow sense to be subsumed by the history of textual transmission. Such an inclusive notion of our discipline, stretching from the earliest to the most recent written communication would enable contrastive diachronic approaches which could generate greater insights into the nature of phenomena occurring at any of the periods.

23 The title of the inaugural lecture at the University of Utrecht of Professor Peter de Voogd. Amsterdam 1991.

24 McKenzie, ‘The book as an expressive form’, 4-5.

25 Darnton, The kiss of Lamourette, 111