Literary Machines is a book first published in 1980 by Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm Nelson is an American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published it in 1965...

, and republished 9 times by 1993. It offers an extensive overview of Nelson's term "hypertext

Hypertext

Hypertext is text displayed on a computer or other electronic device with references to other text that the reader can immediately access, usually by a mouse click or keypress sequence. Apart from running text, hypertext may contain tables, images and other presentational devices. Hypertext is the...

" as well as Nelson's Project Xanadu

Project Xanadu

Project Xanadu was the first hypertext project, founded in 1960 by Ted Nelson. Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it an improvement over the World Wide Web, with mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper...

. It also includes other theories by Nelson, including "tumblers" for addressing bits in files past and present, "transclusion

Transclusion

In computer science, transclusion is the inclusion of a document or part of a document into another document by reference.For example, an article about a country might include a chart or a paragraph describing that country's agricultural exports from a different article about agriculture...

" as a method for including original work in one's own work, and "micropayment

Micropayment

A micropayment is a financial transaction involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. PayPal defines a micropayment as a transaction of less than 12 USD while Visa prefers transactions under 20 Australian dollars, and though micropayments were originally envisioned to...

s" to pay for the use. The format of the book is nonlinear, as the chapters are arranged in such a way that the text can be read out of order.

External links

• Reprint edition by Eastgate - ISBN 0-89347-062-7
• Stephen W. Smoliar, "Review of 'Literary machines' by Ted Nelson, 1983", ACM
  Association for Computing Machinery
  The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
  
   SIGSOFT
  SIGSOFT
  The Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Software Engineering provides a forum for computing professionals from industry, government and academia to examine principles, practices, and new research results in software engineering....
  
  Software Engineering Notes, October 1983, p.34-36, webpage: Abstract of review (with link), read 2009-01-26.