Descriptive eBibliography.

There's a pretty fascinating post from Tom Peters over at the ALA TechSource blog in which he summarizes two addresses given at the ALA Conference in New Orleans way back in June. Tom writes about what he describes as a debate between the advocates of what he calls "PSS" reading (i.e., Paper, Solitude, Silence) and those who call for more expansive notions of reading, ones that would include gaming and other interactive media as alternative kinds of "texts" that are, in effect, being "read" by participants. I am drawn to the latter, more broad sense of what it means to "read" a "text." On the other hand, I spend the majority of my professional life engaged in what Kevin Starr (California State Librarian Emeritus and one of the speakers) describes as the core discipline of our profession: bibliography -- the knowledge of books and their contents. The debate here is mirrored in my classes this semester, with 753 representing the possibilities of electronic utilities and my other class, 710: Descriptive Bibliography, the process by which paper based, bound books are identified. There is room in this field for both disciplines. There may even be potential for crossover. In class last Thursday, Ed Valauskas pointed out that the tradition of descriptive bibliography begins to break down with the development of electronic publishing. "How do you do a collation for an ebook?" he asked. All of which leads me to wonder what traditions might develop for describing these new texts. While the procedure by which bound books are described may not apply to electronic media, there is nevertheless an ethic to descriptive bibliography (that is, describing a book in such a way that, when read, the description might be used to identify the book in some unforeseen future) that might nevertheless be useful.