As a volume, a book offers essentially a solution to organize a discourse in space. It has an architectural function.
In his 2011 article How Books Will Become Machines, Professor Frédéric Kaplan presents the Book as an architectural object. Authors resemble architects in elaborating how knowledge will be organized:
Metaphorically, the Book can be thought of as a closed space, which can be internally organized, like a house, a small garden, a church, a theater stage. The author plays the role of an architect.
As such, the conception of a book as a technical (and design1) object implies the conception of a dynamic architectural space where thinking is developed. In what ways should architecture (a third-party field) play a role in this thinking and in what ways shouldn’t it (to maintain the specificity of the book)?
There is a multiformat publication exploring the book and the world of publishing (in French): Le livre en contexte numérique: un défi de design. ↩︎