Preface A THRESHOLD TO THE WORK AT HAND

This book brings a variety of perspectives to the examination of the potential uses and expansions of paratextual theory in digital culture. We knew from the beginning that our approach would be interdisciplinary; our own backgrounds and current fields of study made it so de facto. More than a necessity, it was also a wish, because we believed the current state of research on or around the paratext warranted the hypothesis that Gérard Genette's (1997) framework could be used as a shared language which would allow us to benefit from the knowledge and methods of a wide range of disciplines. The process by which this book was published is a familiar one. Following our call for chapters, extended abstracts were reviewed by the co-editors and invitations to submit full chapters were sent. Full chapter submissions then went through a double-blind peer review process, each chapter receiving two evaluations, as well as editorial comments, no matter whether the final decision was to include the chapter or not. The copy-editing process was much more complex. The publisher, IGI Global, designed the look and feel of the book; its copy-editing services cover typesetting and layout, the creation of the index, as well as the processing and formatting of all references, but not the more minute linguistic work. We are both native French-speakers, and so we hired Tracy Pettit, of TransSigma Translations, to copy-edit the book. She is based in Canada, but the choice was made to let the authors decide whether they preferred to see their work edited according to American, Canadian, or English standards. Amanda Cossham, Principal Lecturer, Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, came on board as an eleventh-hour ally and made further revisions to such paratextual elements as the table of contents, introduction, preface, and acknowledgments, as well as to chapters 5, 8, and 9. In IGI Global's publication process, proofs are sent to chapter authors and editors at the same time and returned within a few days; there may therefore be, at times and in places, variations in the copy-editing practices or standards, as authors may have suggested changes while being unaware of the editors' or other contributors' choices, and vice-versa. It is in the hopes that the reader will overlook these variations that we explain the process. The book begins with the foreword by Blaise Cronin. It is a true threshold to this book, as it shows the paratext's …