Binding Media: Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas

by Élika Ortega

Far from causing the "death of the book," the publishing industry's adoption of digital technologies has generated a multitude of new works that push the boundaries of literature and its presentation. In this fascinating new work, Élika Ortega proposes the notion of "binding media" — a practice where authors and publishers "fasten together" a codex and electronic or digital media to create literary works in the form of hybrid print-digital objects. Examining more than a hundred literary works from across the Americas, Ortega argues that binding media are not simply experimentations but a unique contemporary form of the book that effectively challenges conventional regional and linguistic boundaries. Furthermore, the book demonstrates that binding media have remained marginal in the publishing industry due to technological imperatives like planned obsolescence and commercial ones like replicability and standardization that run counter to these bespoke literary projects. Although many binding media and other hybrid publishing initiatives have perished, they've left behind a wealth of material; collecting and tracing the residues of these foreshortened projects, Ortega builds a fascinating history of hybrid publishing. Ultimately, this essential account of contemporary book history highlights the way binding media help illuminate processes of cultural hybridization that have been instigated by the expediency of globalized digital technologies and transnational dynamics.

342 pages, Hardcover

Published March 4, 2025

Reviews

[Colin Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ortega defines a category of literature that previously did not have a great label - works of electronic literature that also have accompanying print or otherwise physical media components. Ortega makes a good case for why these need to be considered in their own right and how these seemingly niche works fit into the bigger picture of e-lit and literature more broadly.

A handful of specific binding media works are elaborated on in the book, though these are only the tip of the iceberg berg for the impressive corpus that Ortega has collected and indexed. This book isn’t intended as an anthology or archival project - though she does speak to the challenges of preserving these works that imminently encounter their own obsolescence - but I do wish there had been more discussion of the characteristics of the corpus overall. Ortega provides great definitions for what constitutes binding media, but I would have liked more analysis of the whole lot in addition to the handful of close readings.