Piper 2012

Piper, Andrew. Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

"electronic reading has a very deep bibliographic history. In Gertrude Stein's words, books were there. It is this thereness that is both essential for understanding the medium of the book (that books exist as finite objects in the world) and also for reminding us that we cannot think about our electronic future without contending with its antecedent, the bookish past. books got there first. Books and screens are now bound up with one antoher whether we like it or not. Only in patiently working through this entanglement will we be able to understand how new technologies will, or will not, change how we read. I can imagine a world without books. I cannot imagine one without reading." (ix)

"Everything that has been said about life in an online world has already been said about books." (xi)

"The question is not one of 'versus,' of two single antagonists squaring off in a ring; rather, the question is far more ecological in nature. How will these two very different species and their many varieties coexist within the greater ecosystem known as reading?" (xi)

The Companion to Alfred Ronald's Fly Fisher's Entomology (1836) -- contains hundres of flies hooked into its pages (11)

Bubble Books That Sing, books that sing from the 1920s

"If the book is a thing you can put things into, the electronic book keeps things out. We cannot see, let alone finger, the source of the screen's letters, the electromagnetically charged 'hard drive', without destroying it, though we can, in a telling reversal of fortune, touch our software." (13)

frontispiece, buildings; "The frontispieces of books are a reminder of the way reading is at bottom always multiple." (29)