A PROPOSITION FOR BOOK PUBLISHING
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Define a book as the set of pages containing the book's ISBN.

By this proposition the book is essentially unbound.

In addition, no bound book is possible. Considering a bound book, there
will always be pages containing the book's ISBN outside its bounds - a
minimal example being a record in the ISBN administration system, if
not, the book would simply not be part of the ISBN system. So being part
of the ISBN system the book will be unbound per se.

With objective irony the ISBN system make the unbounding of books not
only possible but the logical conclusion - if a book is uniquely
identified by its ISBN, then why not uniquely identify a book by its
ISBN?!

Following the proposition the books could be considered 'hyperbooks' in
the traditional sense, being non-linear, extra-dimensional, fragmented,
fractal, viral, etc in varied forms of open-ended, possible, mutable, or
generative structures.
Another suggestive term could be 'cypherbook' - cypher/cipher meaning
'writing/volume'[1] in general; 'number, zero'[2] as the book is defined
nominal empty and by its ISBN only; 'transformed/coded/symbolic'[2] as
the content is transformed/coded more extensively by its (unbound)
dispersal in different contexts, and with structures codified to a
higher degree than traditional books; in addition, an anagrammatic
relation to the 'hyperbook' term.
A generic term might simply be 'net.book'.

The term 'book' itself may take on some specific meanings - the basic
notion of a written document, writing on beech, collection of sheets of
paper or other material[3]; as cortex, etym. from 'bark', as
inscriptions in the outer regions of a structure[4] (in fact, any
inscription is 'outer' and marginal in regard to the book as cypher),
which brings the image of neural networks closer to the idea of the
book; the verbal 'book' links 'booking' up to the nominal use of ISBN to
define them; or as 'making a book', bookmakers running the numbers,
rackets, a possibly illicit, anarchic use of the international standard
book number system.

By inverting the definition of a book, actually turning it inside out,
the concept of book is attempted brought back to writing, like an
expansion of the void towards the periphery through an anti-gravitating
force. "The idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality,
is profoundly alien to the sense of writing."[5][6].

Any writing containing the ISBN would be part of the book, thereby the
notion of content is also altered, say, like matter of the universe,
where only 4% is estimated atomic matter - the rest being dark matter
(23%) and dark energy (73%). The content of a book could spread out in
any degree in the spectral dimensions
public-private/information-noise/text-cypher/etc, making book a body of
matter in the more physical sense, like consisting of atomic text,
dark-ambient text, dark-ambient writing.

Concerning licensing, since the books are inherently unbound no overall
copyright can apply. If a book cannot be bound, surely it cannot be
copyrighted. In fact, copyrighting the book would violate the ISBN
system - the ISBN system itself would actually be violating the book's
copyright by recording it - which again would violate the book, making
it impossible. Copyright issues would therefore have to be partial to
the book and in practice distributed to its pages and actual writing
which could be copyrighted in the usual manner. Following this, an open
source/content copyleft licence[7], would seem the proper thing and
default modus for the book and assure its essentially open and free
distribution and mutation.

Expanding on the idea of constituting the book on its ISBN only, other
usages and notions of the book concept could be opened up for creative
investigation, one reason being that technology and new media
immaterializes and fuses different forms into basically one digital
form, and since the content of that form often is aggregates into one
big, interconnected blob - or so we would like to think, alltogether
emphasizing the virtuality of the book, freed from its material basis.
In a more general interpretation, the book could constitute any kind of
real or virtual intellectual 'work', ranging from physical artwork to
networked ideas, by being its possibly unique identifier, like a
signature, tag, etc, and thereby help and preserve different kinds of
distributed, networked arts and gain identity - by analogy, maybe as
the IP identifies a machine in a network, the ISBN would identify a
work in the cultural net, dispersed or immersed into it.

To begin with, announcing the publication of 12 books accordingly:
ISBN 82-92428-05-4
ISBN 82-92428-06-2
ISBN 82-92428-08-9
ISBN 82-92428-10-0
ISBN 82-92428-11-9
ISBN 82-92428-13-5
ISBN 82-92428-14-3
ISBN 82-92428-18-6
ISBN 82-92428-19-4
ISBN 82-92428-20-8
ISBN 82-92428-21-6

True to the initial proposition these books are defined by their ISBNs
only, the content of a book being the (possible empty) set of documents
containing the ISBN. Actually, some of these specific books already have
some form of content from preliminar usage and are based on various
topics[8], but that doesn't change their status or limit their usage as
they are principally open, subject to writing, being what is actually
written into them, being written, written beings.

For practical purposes, once the books attain some sort of substance,
stabilizes, or in other ways attain a reportable identity they'd be
reported and updated to the appropriate ISBN office by the publisher
owning the ISBNs, and thereby available like any other book in their
information system.

Since the books are unbound they won't have any interface other than
their pages' immediate contexts, so if any overall interface at all, it
would have to be made, which is precisely an etymologic meaning of
'face' (from facere, to make), so interfacing the book would in a sense
also be the making of it (and be part of it in a selvreflexive way).
Such interfaces could be readily made for instance using search engines
or scripts in indexing/gathering/filtering material into different
partitions.

Additional structuring of the books could be made using cyphers for
signing, authenticating, encrypting material if they were intended for
special authoring or ways of reading.

A closing topos, restating Baudrillard in his exposition of value[9],
query-replaced into this setting of book publishing as seen apt for the
purpose:
Book stages: natural books, commodity books, structural books
(hypertext), fractal books (viral, radiant). Fractal books prolificly
only refer to themselves, radiating in all directions - publishing as
contiguity. The book no longer has any equivalence, an epidemic of book,
metastasis of text, haphazard proliferation and dispersal of book. We
should no longer speak of 'book' at all, for this kind of propagation or
chain reaction makes all books impossible. Yet things continue to
function long after their idea have disappeared and in total
indifference to their own content, the paradoxical fact is that they
function even better under these circumstances. The book is no longer a
metaphor for logos etc or anything at all, but merely the locus of
metastasis, of the machine-like connections between all its processes,
of an endless programming devoid of any symbolic organization or
overarching purpose: the book is thus given over to the pure promiscuity
of its relationship to itself as ISBN - the same promiscuity that
characterizes networks.

Finally, three small images of books for the occation:
http://noemata.net/books/b02.jpg (6k)
http://noemata.net/books/b03.jpg (8k)
http://noemata.net/books/b06.jpg (7k)



(Redistribute where appropriate, comments are welcome.)

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[1] cipher - This word has a comprehensive meaning in Scripture. In the
Old Testament it is the rendering of the Hebrew word _sepher_, which
properly means a "writing," and then a "volume" (Ex. 17:14; Deut. 28:58;
29:20; Job 19:23) or "roll of a book" (Jer. 36:2, 4).
– http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Cipher

[2]