Book People Archive

serial books? serial libraries?

Recently, I've been having a series of discussions about how
successful ebooks seem to be different from their predecessor, the
physical book.  I'm thinking primarily of Web-based books and
libraries, like Wikipedia, the New York Times, and the ACM digital
library.  One of my favorites is Gregg Easterbrook's "TMQ", a great
series on football (and assorted other topics like the wildly
excessive salary of the director of the Smithsonian, and the essential
stupidity of the new Battlestar Galactica series :-), which is now
back at ESPN, at
http://sports.espn.go.com/keyword/search?searchString=gregg_easterbrook&rT=sports.
Many of these books seem to be serial in nature, and much more
fragmented than traditional books.

There are a number of reasons for this.  For example, revenue is
extracted from this kind of publishing by bringing back readers for
more and more again.  And Internet delivery systems have been better
at providing short passages and articles than long material.  Of
course, on-line books also have the freedom to go beyond the enforced
one-dimensional linear layout of a physical book, and some authors are
experimenting with that freedom.

Many people don't seem to think of these Web-based books as "books",
mainly because of their differences, I suspect.  Are these actually
books?  The On-Line Books Page points to Wikipedia, for instance, but
not to the New York Times, or to TMQ.

Are they going to influence mass-market writing?  I'm guessing that
more and more books, both fiction and non-fiction, will adopt the
"serial" (not new in publishing) and "fragmented" characteristics.
On-line books could restore the short story.

What about more conventional narrative books?  Can libraries featuring
them generate continuous new content solely by providing facilities
for linking and annotation?  Will every page of every on-line book
have its own comment group?

Bill