and I
click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around
(from one click to another, as the links appear). You can do
this in the written media, of course. But the difference is
striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write
the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play.
(...)

In fact, it is not the internet which changed how I write, it
is the first Mac that I discovered through the self-learning of
HyperCard. I still remember how astonished I was during the
month when I was learning about buttons, links, surfing by
analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on
one area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of
cards, and each card could offer new buttons and each button
opened on to a new range, etc. In brief, the learning of
everything on the web that today seems really banal, for me it
was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same
shock when they discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the
laboratories of Rank Xerox). Since then I write directly on the
screen: I use the print medium only occasionally, to fix up a
text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the screen a kind
of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate.
It is only an approximation, because print forces us to have a
linear relationship: the text is developing page after page
(most of the time), whereas the technique of links allows
another relationship to the time and space of imagination. And,
for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into practice
this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book
gives only an idea - which is vague because the book is not
conceived for that."

2005: GOOGLE GETS INTERESTED IN EBOOKS

= [Overview]

The beta version of Google Print went live in May 2005. In
October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google Print as
a project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able to
see excerpts from their books and order them online. In
December 2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print
as a project intended for libraries, to build up a world
digital library by digitizing the collections of main partner
libraries. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped until
further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of
authors and publishers for copyright infringement. The program
resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books.
Google Books has offered books digi