How can you mechanically improve a book?

Can you?

Maybe ‘improve’ isn’t the best word.  I guess you can’t really improve a book, but you can recreate this book digitally and use hypertext to link it to a multitude of arguments, ideas and contexts relating to that book.  I think this will definitely improve the book.  Hypertext seems to keep coming back into this course as a fundamental component to online interaction.  It utilised modern day technology to create our generational community.  Community isn’t the same definition as it used to be.  It is now a group of people who may have never met, yet still offer each other support.  This community can be seen in the Aussie Outlanders Facebook page.

As Roland Barthes said, “A text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”  He may have been unknowingly looking into the future and speaking about the very real parallels to hypertext.  A text which utilises hypertext can end up being extremely more influential than the original text.

Douglas, J. Yellowlees. “Books without Pages—Novels without Endings.” The end of books or books without end? : reading interactive narratives. University of Michigan Press ; University Presses Marketing, 1999. 11-36