I think a few of us caught Julia Panko's excellent talk on the Bob Browne's attempt to Taylorize and rationalize reading via his reading machine. It had me thinking about the pure word as a container and it resonated with a quote from Walter Benjamin I came across that I've been itching to share with folks who might have also heard Panko speak. It seems clear that Benjamin is thinking of a similar project as that of Brown's.
Already today, as the contemporary mode of knowledge production demonstrated, the book is an obsolete mediation between two different card filing systems. For everything essential is found in the note boxes of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates into his or her own note file. (qtd. in Susan Buck-Morss's Dialectics of Seeing: Benjamin and the Arcades Project, 336)
Of course, it doesn't escape Buck-Morss that Benjamin's Arcades Project is something like that note boxes. That's all.