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Since 2005, François Bon, who began his literary career in the 1980s as a novelist, has gradually shifted the focus of his work onto his now all-encompassing web-based literary and multimedia oeuvre, tierslivre.net. As part of this transition from paper to web, Bon returned to his printed books to showcase them digitally. Most notably, in 2010 he undertook to retype his second novel, Limite (1985), to publish it in the form of a blog, prefacing each passage with an autobiographical and critical commentary. Once completed, he reedited the full commented text as an e-book. This article argues that even though all three versions have the same narrative at their core, each stage of this project offers something different to the reader and suggests a different focus and conception of literature. Together they illustrate that the shifts between media change the reading experience even without exploiting much of the potential for hyperlinking and interactivity, and that before and beyond all the possible narrative experiments it enables, the digital transition means for literature a move away from the logic of the book towards the 'logic of the project'.
Keywords: François Bon, digital transition, e-book, electronic literature, Limite, literature on the web, project, reader experience, rewriting, Le Tiers Livre
As of July 2016, the shortest version of François Bon's autobiographical notice on his website Le Tiers Livre [The Third Book] reads: 'Fut.' ['Was'] (Bon 3569).1 The verb is hyperlinked to the front page of the site, directly identifying the author with his virtual writerly empire. It is only in the longer versions of this 'bio' that he mentions the printed books that preceded the site. Bon began his writing career in 1982 as a novelist with Sortie d'usine [Leaving the Factory] (Paris: Minuit), created his first website in 1997, and has since transferred all his activity onto his constantly evolving and expanding virtual Le Tiers Livre, which is now also home to his one-man e-publisher, Tiers Livre Éditeur. Limite (Paris: Minuit, 1985) was his second novel, which he undertook to retype manually in 2010, publishing it as a series on tierslivre. net as he progressed (Bon 2242), changing very little but prefacing every passage with an autobiographical commentary on its genesis and content. When the annotated...