Week 6: Digital Pages

While researching this week's topic, I found a number of interesting and weird apps that experiment with the page as a digital entity. I chose to write about a website called Authorgraph because it surprised and amused me. Rather than tackling issues of interactivity such as page flipping, or any of the opportunities listed by Andrew Piper (roaming, zooming, and streaming), it addresses a certain mark of provenance: autographs. I should specify, I don't mean this in the book history sense, where every inscription of one's own name is an autograph, but more specifically as an author's name and perhaps a special inscription to the book's owner.

According to its website, Authorgraph makes it possible for authors to sign ebooks for fans. The ebook owner creates an account and may browse through the website for the desired author, send a request for an autorgraph, and receive an email notification when their digital text has been 'autographed'. From that point on, the signed text will be viewable through reading apps and devices. I find this both pretty geeky and kind of cool because autographs can be an important part of book collecting. They can make a book rare or important or just full of sentimental value. I've got a few autographed books in my collection, including a Massey Lecture inscribed, "To Christie - Stephen Lewis." Oh well, thanks for trying, Stephen. Anyway, as much of a part of physical book culture as this is, Authorgraph is the first digital program for provenance I've heard of. Other programs allow you to highlight or add notes and marginalia, but this website builds the author-reader relationship for ebooks the way good ol' book signings have for print books.

The place of inscriptions and autographs in ebooks makes me think back to Week 2's  "Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: the State of the Discipline" by Kirschenbaum and Werner. Their discussion of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom as an ebook with a wealth of extras, interviews, customer reviews and alternate pdf torrents raises the question of how book history and english literature will be studied in the future.

"The convergence between the materially-minded pursuits of book history and the agendas of contemporary digital studies opens the way for sophisticated studies of contemporary reading, writing, and publishing that are grounded in the individual circumstances of authoring technologies like word processing and beyond, as well as the bookseller’s marketplace, networks for electronic dissemination, and readerly histories that spill across the whole of the Web 2.0 landscape." (p.426)  

In the future, will typed marginalia and e-autographs on digital pages be the way we study the provenance and special characteristics of the 21st century book? And will these types of special alterations make ebooks collectible or cherished in the way that print books continue to be?

Authorgraph's recent offerings

However, it might be a bit premature to compare this with future Franzen scholarship. It could just be that this concept is in its infancy, but as you can see from the screenshot, it seems like the authors ready to sign your ebook title pages are a fairly narrow group, mostly romance and scifi. I didn't recognize any names that I browsed through. So perhaps a site like Authorgraph would benefit research into self-publishing or online fan communities.And I suppose this platform allows new authors who perhaps publish exclusively digital content to connect with fans in a way that would be difficult through the traditional book store signing/public reading route.


Bibliography:
Authorgraph.com
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Sarah Werner, "Digital Scholarship and Digital Studies: the State of the Discipline," Book History 17 (2014): 406-58
 Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. University of Chicago Press, 2012.