The story, the work of art, consists of what Cory chose to put on paper (or, in modern times, in a file), and what he chose to fix as necessary to present his work (separation into paragraphs and chapters, perhaps; the precise word order in all cases). This has very little to do with the source of the presentation, soit Webpage, soit Kindle, etc. (what you are calling the medium). I would tell you that the real medium is text, and how you choose to project that medium is rather immaterial to the success (artistic or otherwise) of Cory’s book.
I’ll be blunt: audiences don’t even really notice a difference anymore. If you lay out Cory’s book badly on the Web, they may well say “Great book, but the Web designer sucks.” That is because what the Web designer adds has very little to do with what is essential to present Cory’s idea. If they read it in a format like older Project Gutenberg text files, they won’t have any problems understanding what he was getting at.
When I write a piece of music, I have a whole slew of choices to make to present my idea, and some choices are more germane to the idea than others. I may take pains to specify phrasing in one passage, and not in another, because the interpreter’s choice in the latter won’t change the apperception of my idea: we tend to lock down the choices we figure are needed to present the idea clearly (and what is locked down can vary - plenty of room for improvised music, eh?). The trick is to create ordered successions of sounds that get across our ideas: that’s the Darstellung or presentation of the idea. You can make limited substitutions, perhaps substituting a brass quartet for an organ, for example, or chip tunes for an organ, and maintain the idea, but after a point, you get an new work: Bach chorale preludes are original works, not arrangements, even though he normally quotes the original chorales in full. In that way the content is inseparable from the presentation.
It’s also part of the presentation, because it undoubtedly will have a specific role in presenting his idea, and will need to be presented in a specific region in the text to do so. In that way the content is inseparable from the presentation.
Yup, and we’ve been using those terms for several centuries now, so it annoys us to see techies misusing them.
