Do E-Book Readers Understand Digital Documents?

Abstract

The question raised in the title is ambiguous at best, absurd at worst. The word “reader” obviously creates ambiguity but here we are talking about devices, and not about humans. We are talking about devices that “read” digital documents in such a way that humans can then interact symbolically with them, and even read them if indeed this is their intention. The absurdity is linked to the word “understand”: how can a machine “understand” a document? Indeed, machines do not understand documents in the usual sense of the word; however, structured and constrained by their design as they are, they do treat and apprehend documents in particular ways. Furthermore, these modes of apprehension can be viewed as the technical translation of how designers or engineers understand documents: they refer to the ways in which the same engineers relate to documents, how they access elements of their meaning and how these documents ought to relate to each other, if at all. In short, a reading device incorporates a vision of what a document is and how it “lives” among humans. This opens the possibility of partial or even total misreadings, and this observation begins to explain the title and its slightly provocative and even cryptic form.