From George Bornstein's Material Modernism: "Many of us hope that the potentialities of an electronic environment will overcome some of the limits of codex display. For example, an electronic edition could handle significant variants in a far superior way, enabling the viewer to select differing versions of the entire poem -- perhaps two, though theoretically a larger number would be possible too -- and to display them either side by side or interlinearly at the viewer's option. Similarly, multimedia presentations would enable far superior forms of annotation [ed. note: like this!], enabling the viewer to click on the word you and find not only an explanation of Yeats' relation to Maud Gonne, but perhaps a photo of her and excerpts fro her own autobiography. Such annotation would need to be layered hypertextually to enable the viewer to select what sort of information he or she wishes. And, finally, computer editions would enable fuller display of bibliographic codes, allowed for both words and pictures of earlier incarnations of a poem. That point deserves further probing. On the one hand, an electronic edition could display pictures of the material embodiments of the text -- cover design, title page, layout, and so forth. On the other hand, and crucially, in the very act of presenting such material the electronic edition indicates its difference from such material. For the computer is a wholly different environment from the book, just as the book is from the manuscript. By displaying previous print incarnations of a poem, the computer emphasizes that it itself is not such a print incarnation, but rather a translation of that into a different medium. We have almost a pure case of Derridean presence and absence: the more the electronic edition invokes images of print incarnations, the more aware the viewer becomes that the electronic edition is not such an incarnation. That is both its strength and its weakness: its strength because of superior abilities to display and to manipulate word and image mechanically, and its weakness because of its perpetual inability to create the effect of what it is imaging, namely manuscripts and printed materials."

Bornstein's use here of the terms 'word' and 'image' -- as opposed to 'substabce' or 'material,' which he does much with at other points -- emphasizes what I continue to consider the unsettling immateriality of electronic texts. There is something vaguely sinister in the way authors -- Bornstein, McGann, and Landow among them -- perpetually laud the benefits of electronic editions while holding tightly to aspects of textuality that are rooted in print technology. To borrow a metaphor from science fiction, it's the same sinister feeling as when an android is capable of almost but not quite entirely mimicking sentience and what we call humanity. The gap between the original, 'natural' thing and its imitator is perceived as wide not because it is wide, but because it is perceptible. It is clear that hypertexts have potentials that have yet to be realized -- but we are trapped in the two-dimensional world of the codex, and thousands of years are not so easily shaken off, no matter how many hyperlinked webs you try to establish.

Then, someone alerted my attention to this YouTube video of a demonstration for something called Perceptive Pixel, which is both dazzling and, to someone for whom reading is partially a tactile undertaking, reassuring. Notice, however, that when typing needs to be done, a keyboard appears on the screen. There's still some tendency to let print technology dictate form -- although the three-dimensional graphs at the end are clearly an attempt to pull away from that.