Hot off the presses in the 1450's came the modern book. Gutenberg, by developing a new technology for making movable type, was able to dramatically increase the speed in which books could be produced.
These books allowed for a broad dissemination of new ideas, creating the Age of Enlightenment.
These books were _physical objects_ that had, as objects, a story of their own as they were handed from reader to reader.
As books moved to electronic platforms, leaving their binding behind, another definition of a book was needed – that as a _unique string of words_.
But books, in this new electronic manifestation, still held the same fundamental experience of a single journey of thought from the first word to the last.
Back in the 1963, Nelson introduced the concept of hypertext, influenced by short story by Jorge Borges that was published in 1941, _The Garden of Forking Paths_.
The concept of hypertext was applied by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to allow readers to link pages together at the birth of the World Wide Web.
On the web, using hypertext links, each reader became empowered to follow their own path of discovery.
This new reading experience profoundly affects how we think, creating a new Digital Mind.
Using this Federated Wiki platform, it is now possible not only to write non-linearly, interlinking ideas spatially, but it also empowers each reader to be guided by their own Curiosity to explore new ideas. In a sense it, allows for a Poetry of Patterns the illuminates a whole new potential of hypertext.
Such flexibility challenges us to reconfigure the meaning of a book once again – forming a new meta-definition of a book as a _container of meaning_.
Additional pages in this hyperbook can be explored at DIG Extras.
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