Open-Ended

Abstract

HIDDEN IN THE ATTIC OF HIS SCHOOL, a young boy called Bastian Balthazar Bux reads a book and soon realises that he can interact with the book’s characters, create stories for them, and decide their fates. The Neverending Story (1979) by Michael Ende is a fantastic tale, but it is also an example of our never-ending story of reading and of the ongoingness of the book. Our contribution to transforming the content of a book according to what we make out of it is not in itself remarkable; it applies to everything in our material world and to all of our interactions with tangible cultural artefacts. But books as objects oblige us to hold them with both hands – even if only to place them on a lectern – to access their content (compare our access to a drawing, a painting, a sculpture, where this tactile grasp is absent). With a book we are entitled to aid our understanding of its content by modifying its container. We pass on what we have gathered from our reading to other readers and contribute to the diffusion of the book, but our changes to the materiality of a book (cornering pages or annotating them, for instance) also influence its reading by others. For these reasons, the book forms a central node in a social network of past, present, and future generations of users.