The printed book, with hyperlinks

Each of us caught himself thinking while reading a printed book that he is sorely missed in her many opportunities, obtained by reading the text on the computer. For example, hyperlinks, which could go to learn the meaning of a word and its context. And German artist Maria Fischer has created a printed book with the possibility of hyperlinks.

Hypertext bring in printed books, many authors have tried. Let us recall the “Dictionary of the Khazars” Milorad Pavich, who became our already classics of literature, or experimenting with leaky books by Jonathan Safran Foer. But a full hypertext with hyperlinks to the actual books, it was thought impossible! Anyway, it was so, until the book «Traumgedanken» (“Thoughts of dreams”) by Mary Fisher.

This book is a very small volume – it has only seventy six pages. But some pages are linked together much more closely than any other book. Moreover, they are connected in a figurative (single subject), and in the truest sense of the word (although, to be more precise, it is not linked and cross-linked). After all, this whole book is riddled with lots of colorful threads, leading from word to word from page to page to page, from concept to concept, from author to author.

Thread connecting these same words and concepts scattered throughout the book. So reading, for example, about “freedom” on one page, you can pull on a thread and come to that word to another, where it writes about a different author (the book itself is a collection of literary, philosophical, scientific and psychological texts on dreams, created by the greatest thinkers of the world).

Advances in technology will someday undoubtedly lead to that and in a printed book can be hyperlinked to use (and, perhaps, simply to the disappearance of printed books as such). In the meantime, the experiment «Traumgedanken» by Mary Fisher is the most successful (and, analog) dream come true readers of hypertext and hyperlinks.