In the last couple of years, the CELJ keynote addresses have featured speakers who have discussed some aspect of the advancing electronic world of scholarship. This year, I thought it might be profitable to bring what we know of the book's long history to bear on its future - electronic or otherwise. I looked for two leading experts with deep knowledge in the history of the book and editing to look back, as it were, on the future of the book. The academic journal, of course, is one permutation of the category 'book'. The idea of the 'book,' - or a 'book'- and of reading practices that give the/a 'book' its life in the world, has become a fascinating topic at this historical moment when the technological possibilities of electronic formats have opened up the traditional limitations of the printed book and stimulated much consideration of what a book is or might become. Is the electronic context changing what a 'book' is? Or is it simply giving us a new vantage point from which to observe that it has never been quite so clear what we mean by 'book'? And to what degree have we successfully negotiated the book in its newer guises? David Greetham approaches these issues through the lens of Foucault's notion of the 'author,' trying from several theoretical paths to attempt a spacious conceptualization of 'book'. George Bornstein then challenges editors, publishers, and scholars to address, in practical and outward-looking terms, the various (especially economic) pressures that are significantly limiting our ambitions for the electronic 'book.'
