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When texts began to be printed, people thought that the simple transfer of handwritten information to woodblock or moveable type was the end of the story. At first, printed books were little more than imitations of handwritten texts, without tables of content or page numbers. But gradually, such "dumb" books were made more intelligent: title pages and various kinds of numbers were added, tables of content and footnotes invented, indexes appended, letters and ligatures standardized, etc. The modern book with its ISBN number and various other features is the product of centuries of invention, improvement, and standardization.
But a more convenient book structure is not an end in itself. An unread book is useless, however well structured. The book's raison d'être is, after all, to be read. The more the reader "processes" of the book's information by thinking about it, the more he or she notes down passages, marks the book up with slips of paper and dog-ears, cites from it, goes back to highlighted passages, etc., the more "intelligent" a text becomes.
We now stand at the beginning of the age of electronic text, and as we would expect, electronic text is still extremely dumb. Most of it is simply an imitation of printed text that offers little more than the possibility of fast literal searches. Just look at the menubar of any word processing program: almost all of the available commands are linked to printed output such as font and size, justification, margins, and footnote handling. Hardly any commands are present for the processing of c ontent. The ordinary user cannot even put dog-ears and post-it notes into computer text.
However, just as the printed book gradually developed its potential through useful inventions and improvements, we can expect electronic text to mature. There is no doubt that the baby-age of electronic text is dominated by its form and format, leading to rather boring and annoying preoccupations: what font, what character code, what program, what paper format, what file format, what disk format, what operating system, what computer, what printing machine are you using? No wonder that, once a book or paper is printed, its digital text often gathers dust on some unknown backup disk in a forgotten closet.
But now we are witnessing the dawning of a new age: the age when electronic text focuses on text content as well as structure and appearance. There still are many scholars who think that the digital medium is nothing more than new barrels for the same old wine ‹ just as Europe's universities reasoned when they first heard of Gutenberg's invention. Oxford University produced its first printed book more than thirty years after Gutenberg's invention (1486, Cicero's Pro Milone), an d Cambridge University resisted the new medium for more than seventy years. The university men simply did not realize how this new technology could affect good old learning. Their core misperception was, I think, that format has little to do with content.
A look at these universities' libraries shows how wrong they were; and future libraries harbor a few surprises for those who today think that electronic text is good for little more than desktop publishing. Granted: nobody is yet able to even imagine the new possibilities and prospects of electronic text. Considering that man needed several centuries to take real advantage of printing (see my Code of the Codex), we realize that our learning process with electronic te xt has hardly begun. It begins with "marking up" electronic text, a main theme of the Electronic Bodhidharma No. 4 (see also Dog Ears and SGML). At any rate, one thing is already certain: compared to the digital revolution, the printing revolution will look like a minor event in human history.