New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination

Eve, Martin Paul (2022) New Leaves: Riffling the History of Digital Pagination. Book History 25 (2), pp. 473-496. ISSN 1529-1499.

Abstract

This article presents a new history of digital pagination. Virtual pagination works very differently from its print correlate. Despite this, encapsulated and paginated formats have gained a solid digital foothold. Nonetheless, many commentators have argued that we must overcome such a reliance on and continuity with print in the digital space. This article charts a fresh history of the development of digital pagination through a revisionist interrogation of three interrelated phenomena: 1. That digital pages do not behave as do their physical correlates but instead mimic earlier historical forms of print that fused pagination, scrolling, and the tablet form. 2. That the development of PDF was almost abandoned by Adobe’s board of directors, who could see no audience for it. 3. That there are other more robust lineages of constraint for digital pages from cinema and television. Drawing on new correspondence with the creators of the PDF format I argue from these historical tracings that nothing was sure about the development of textual pagination in the digital space. Further, the digital page almost never came to the prominence and dominance now presumed in discussions of digital reading.

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