Leaving twentieth-century understanding of documents

In this essay we present a scenario of the future of an e-book and in the light of this scenario we discuss some issues and implications of such an artifact. Central to this scenario are issues of technology, digitalism, choice- or survival of technologies, ethics, economics, standardization and choice- and adoption of such standards and - finally - concepts and tools to talk about such artifacts. The latter issue, we argue, is both input into the discussion of what a document is and an argument for adoption of a new definition and concept of a document. Most of all, this essay is meant as a comment in order to provoke reflection of what technology might bring and briefly discuss how already present technology has given us some insight into these issues already. In this context, we take one step backwards and discuss an underlying concept of documents and documentation in light of digitization and how digitization can build a digital ecosystem based on what used to be denoted a book, today an e-book, in the future - a digital ecosystem, yet to be labelled.