Interactive Media for Occult Book Makers

Digital or electronic books have existed since the 1960s and arguably earlier. Often they are simply digital copies of texts and/or images, which read pretty much like an ordinary book, but they have the advantage that they can be reproduced easily, and they can be stored without taking up much physical space — today, I can fit thousands of ebooks on something that clips to a keychain. Their main drawback — and this holds more or less true for all of the types of digital media I’ll talk about today — is that as the technology platforms change, which run the programs that allow us to read or interact with these digital books, there is a risk of the books becoming unreadable and obsolete. One appealing quality that paper books have is that they can last for hundreds of years, and can be read by any literate person. But it’s also true that the nature of computers makes it possible, in principle, to recreate the technologies that allow us to read any electronic book from the past. And I can tell you from personal experience that it is exhilarating to interface with some old, esoteric digital document, if the content of that document is still relevant or interesting. If feels like you’re encountering some long-lost knowledge. It’s a cool experience.

However, for me, the real advantage to making books on computers is that the computer facilitates novel interactions that are difficult or impossible to accomplish in paper-based media.

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