Gary Hall is a cultural and media theorist who has written many books on these subjects. He is a professor of Media and Performing Arts at Conventry University (UK) and co-founder of Open Humanities Press.

Gary Hall @ The Unbound Book Conference photo cc by-sa Sebastiaan ter Burg

Gary Hall started his talk which was part of the session The Unbound Book with the Oxford dictionary definition of the word ‘book’. He explained that the definition of a book as pages fastened together is now outdated because of new developments such as augmented reality. The ‘book’ is now disrupted and dislocated. He argued that if the book has a future it is in unbound form, the book must be transformed to keep it alive. However this does not mean that conventional definitions of the book are discarded, they are still valid.

The main argument of Gary Hall is that books have always been liquid and living. Electronic publishing has helped to make us aware of this. He mentioned the examples of the Bible and Shakespeare’s first folio to prove this point. Gary Hall argues that a book should be free, however this is currently not the case. Not only is the book bound between two covers, it is also legally bound. Here Gary Hall quoted McKenzie Wark:

“Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.”

Hall proposes as a solution the ‘academic gift economy’ in which research is circulated for free. The problem is that publishers own the rights of published works therefore works can’t be published in Open Access. He mentions that it is difficult to find publishers who allow authors to self-archive their articles. Publishing is changing because of new technological developments. These developments also change the idea of the book itself. Gary Hall quotes Graham Harman who argues that in a few years everyone will be able to publish a book in minutes. This means that publishing is destined to become vanity publishing. Hall uses Open Notebook to make his articles freely available in real-time. Readers can make contributions to his chapters before the book is bound by publishers. He explains how Open Humanities Press has been exploring the idea of liquid books. It is possible to publish books as a Wiki which makes it possible for readers to rewrite and comment. In this model the book is not fixed but rather it is fluid, it can be updated, reordered, reimagined. It is a work in progress, a work in an ongoing stage. Gary explains that in this way the book can be made collaboratively and authors can contribute anonymously.

Hall explains that in the future there will be different kinds of publishing. To illustrate this he mentions some examples such as research articles which embed video which Elsevier calls ‘the article of the future’. Another new development in publishing is the Kindle Single which is longer than a magazine article and shorter than a novel. He also mentioned the Remixthebook project which contains a remix of American sentences.

Gary Hall ended his talk with the conclusion that books have always been fluid and that because of electronic publishing, certain questions are raised such as: What is a book? And what is an author? In his opinion these questions should have been brought up earlier.