One of the more remarkable works described in Hayles’ text is Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s “Screen” composed for a virtual reality projection room at the E.L.O.’s offices at the University of Maryland. The work begins with a voiceover from Coover, “In a world of illusions we hold ourselves in place by memories.” The text of two recollections, one from a man’s perspective the other from a woman’s, are projected on opposing walls. Viewed through 3-D goggles they soon begin to float off these surfaces. The reader can then attempt to hit them back into place using a ‘data glove,’ but the words careen off at unexpected angles, re-adhering to the walls to form nonsense and neologisms. Despite the reader’s best efforts, the words inevitably end up in an illegible pile on the floor. This three-walled virtual reality projection room recalls the ‘phono-color walls’ of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 in which a lonely, suicidal housewife ‘interacts’ with performers projected onto the walls by reading aloud the script for a drama’s absent and acquiescent character. Despite the commendable innovations of the largely web-based works profiled in Hayles’ book, one has a hard time stomaching the idea that what residents of developed nations really need right now is more time in front of a screen.

If talk of the death of the book seems a bit premature at a time when print literature in many ways seems to be extraordinarily vital, Hayles attributes some of this vitality to the competition and interaction between the two media. Taking the works of Jonathon Safran Foer, Mark Z. Danielewski and Salvador Plascencia as her examples, Hayles cites their use of innovative computer-aided typography, interest in code and multimedia worldview as the result of an era in which nearly all literature is composed edited and printed using computers. “Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium.” In Hayles’ view, the predominance of electronic literature is not only inevitable, it has already happened: all contemporary literature is already electronic literature.