“As a person who loves reading and has bought and read literally thousands of books, I never thought I’d say it, but I don’t like reading books anymore. It’s not that I don’t enjoy reading stories, or novels, nonfiction, etc. – it’s that I don’t like reading books. That’s right, the ink-on-paper all bound in one big lump of dead tree things. I can’t stand them.”
Philippe Bootz – Alire: A Relentless Literary Investigation
“The web-based literary journal Alire was created in January 1989 by the Parisian groupL.A.I.R.E. (Lecture, Art, Innovation, Recherche, Écriture) -which included Philippe Bootz, Frédéric Develay, Jean-Marie Dutey, Claude Maillard and Tibor Papp. Alire is known as the oldest multimedia journal in Europe, and certainly one of the oldest in the West. Before the arrival of CD-ROMs, before the Internet explosion, the journal was already publishing poetry written for and intended to be read through computers.”
“This paper examines competing visions for the future of the book in the digital environment, with particular attention to questions about the social implications of controls over intellectual property, such as continuity of cultural memory”
Clifford Lynch, First Monday, volume 6, number 6 (June 2001)
