One thing I'm particularly interested in is the conversion of printed material into electronic format. The Web represents an amazing potential to bring the "networking effect" to the vast world of printed text; but, as a book lover, I'm also interested in maintaining the "look and feel" of my best-loved books.

A printed book contains both more and less information than an electronic text. The size, shape, layout, even the smell of a favorite book all contribute to the reading experience; but the information that a book contains is not easily susceptible to the vast array of technologies that have been developed to organize and manipulate textual information. On the other hand, a written work that exists in electronic format is almost never able to excite the passions of a true book lover in the same way that even the most humble paperback can.

Or, put another way, a printed book is more like an organism—special, unique, corruptible; whereas an electronic text is more like a Platonic ideal—eternal, essential, unmoving. The perfect book would incorporate the best of both worlds.

I don't think the circumstances yet exist to create the ideal combination of these two aspects, and perhaps they never will. But I do believe that it's possible to breathe a bit more life into electronic text, and perhaps to suggest to the reader the experience of reading a "real" book. Below is my own modest attempt to point towards that possibility.

My subject is Chapter Seven of Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas"—a collection of his columns for Scientific American from January, 1981 to July, 1983. (Those of you familiar with Hofstadter's work know that he shares a love of books as well, so this was a particularly apt example to use.) The text was scanned in TIFF format, converted to text using OCR, proofread by hand, laid out using Adobe Pagemaker, and printed to Acrobat format using Acrobat Distiller. The figures were processed using Adobe Photoshop. On the left is a JPG image of the first page of the text, for comparison. On the right is the pdf version of the entire chapter. As you can see, I've done my very best to preserve the "look and feel" of the original book. The page size, margins, and typefaces were all reproduced as closely as possible.

View the first page (JPG image, 52K)

Read the entire chapter (pdf format, 112K)

If you enjoyed reading this essay by Douglas Hofstadter, you might also want to read his "Person Paper on Purity in Language" (which is the essay he refers to at the end of Chapter 7).