Although this book focuses on the problems and potentials for electronic representations of the fundamental materials of document-based knowledge in literature, similar conditions obtain for representations of works in music, philosophy, history, the law, and religion. These fields find in paper documents the primary materials of their research and, as in all other fields, use documents as repositories of scholarly knowledge. It would please me if the principles emerging from this study were found applicable in these other fields as well.

The title, From Gutenberg to Google, came to me in Mainz, Germany, at the Gutenberg Museum. As I stood looking at copies of the first book printed from moveable type 500 years ago – its beauty, its endurance – I had a vision in the form of a question: where, in 500 years, would anyone stand to look at a museum display of the first electronic book and would the words “endurance” and “beauty” come to mind? The question may have a breath-taking answer, though I do not know what it is. Endurance and beauty were, perhaps, byproducts and not the primary goal of Gutenberg's enterprise. The future of electronic editing dawns as clearly bright to us now as the future of printing must have appeared in the first decades following 1452 to the scribes employed on the new medium of print. Other scribes employed in scriptoria continued to produce elegant manuscripts for over 100 years.