Write-ups

Welcome Remarks, Opening Conversation: “Future Formats of Texts: E–books and Old Books,” and Session I: “Storage and Retrieval”

Write-up by Hansun Hsiung (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard)

While the history of ideas is often thought to progress by standing on the shoulders of giants (broken link), the history of books, at times, gains more insight from the act of sitting. With thirty-six years spent in the employ of the Bodleian Library, the Rev. Alfred Hackman (1811–1874) lived with books close to his mind and heart, as well as his rear end:

“During all the time of [Hackman's] service in the Library he had used as a cushion in his plain wooden armchair a certain vellum-bound folio, which by its indented side, worn down by continual pressure, bore testimony to the use to which it had been put. . . when after Hackman's departure from the Library it was removed from its resting-place of years, some amusement was caused by finding that the chief compiler of the last printed Catalogue had omitted from his Catalogue the volume on which he sat, of which too, although of no special value, there was no other copy in the Library!”
—William Dunn Macray, Annals of the Bodleian Library, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890): 388 n.1.

It was with this intriguing anecdote that Leah Price ’91, RI ’07 (page not found), urged her audience to sit down for a day and reconsider the nature of “books.” Counted, sorted, shelved, stacked; sniffed and rubbed; set down as a doorstop, riser, or substitute cushion; and, occasionally, read, books—in their myriad uses—are anything but self-evident, or perhaps self-evident only in the manner that Ambrose Bierce defined that term: “adj. evident to one's self and to nobody else.”

Indeed, the diverse range of interests and competencies that assembled on October 29, 2010, at the Radcliffe Institute testified to the transdisciplinary, transnational puzzle of the book. As Barbara J. Groszpage (page not found), Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, explained in her opening remarks, the initial idea for the conference emerged during a conversation between a literary scholar (Diana Sorenson RI ’11)(page not found), and a computer scientist (Grosz herself). The turn of their talk was an experience familiar to many of us: a shared passion for books, leading to a question of “what, exactly, makes a book, a book.” A common enough speculative musing, perhaps; in this case, however, their ideas had the fortune of meeting with the initiative of Professors Ann Blair ’84, BI ’99 (page not found) and Leah Price, culminating in the conference and query, “Why Books?”

So it was that by nine o'clock in the morning on Friday, over five hundred attendees had gathered, crowding into Radcliffe Gymnasium and overflowing into Agassiz Theater, where the conference proceedings were being simulcast. Some made pilgrimages from across the Atlantic; others came from across the Charles. Together, these participants represented not only an atypical academic alliance of historians, sociologists, literary critics, and computer scientists, but also a wide set of professionals—librarians, publishers, conservators, curators, and, simply, the curious.

The question, “Why Books?” yields to multiple interpretations. Substantive debate began first with two short (15 minutes) provocations by Robert Darnton (page not found) and Stuart Shieber RI ’07 (page not found), who chose to view the conference theme through the alleged challenge posed to codex books by e-books. Darnton's argument restated a thesis known already to those following his work: books and digital media, rather than being in competition, are complementary. Darnton illustrated the argument through two personal examples. Those with a copy of The Case for Books at hand can turn to pages 55–57 for a more detailed summary of the first story—his discovery as an undergraduate of Melville's marginalia in a volume of Emerson's Essays. Now, through an online project on the history of reading, Melville's copy of Emerson is available for free across the world to those with internet access. In this case, digitization, enabling access to rare items kept usually under careful guard, only serves to enhance and spread the cause of books.

As his next example, Darnton spoke of his newest monograph, Poetry and the Police, a work wherein he treated the problem of oral dissemination of information, particularly in the form of popular song. While in the past, the aural richness of song would have been lost in its conversion to written text, the web technology of today allowed Darnton to post mp3s of these songs online, to be listened to as one works through his book. After these two illustrations of digital-print complementarity, Darnton finished with the possibility of a national digital library, one that would make the holdings of great research libraries available to the world.

Those who felt that Darnton's vision seemed a bit utopian found more analytical realism in Stuart Shieber's presentation, suggestively titled, “Why Not E-books?" For Shieber, books and e-books exhibit clear differences from one another, and are in far greater competition than Darnton would have us believe. We therefore need to ask the following: in what ways are books preferable to e-books, and e-books preferable to books? An accurate answer to this question might help us to decide the path of the book in the face of new technologies. Will e-books be to books as digital camera was to the Polaroid, the former taking over the key functions of the latter more efficiently? Or will their relationship be closer to that of VCR and film, each having its separate functional benefits?

By examining representative complaints lodged against the Amazon Kindle, Shieber distinguished two aspects of the book: its form as a physical object, and its content as an abstract object. Whereas these two were nestled within one another in the print book, e-books disentangle form and content, making the information of the e-book itself distinct from the reading device that determines said information's appearance. Most of the complaints directed against the Kindle in favor of the codex book were precisely that—complaints about the technology of the e-book reader, e.g., its contrast, resolution, color range, and speed. These problems, Shieber argued, were ultimately contingent, insofar as the refinement of the technology involved would likely result in future reading devices preferable to the codex in terms of its formal features—lighter, more portable, searchable by keyword, customizable for the poor-sighted or blind, etc. On the other hand, at the level of content, codex books would still retain advantages. Not only would they allow for certain “ineffable" functions such as pride of ownership, but they would be simpler to preserve, comparably fixed in cost, and more easily transferable from one hand to another (Kindle books, after all, can't be given away, lent, or sold to other parties). The sum result of this separation between form and content, according to Shieber, leads us to the thesis that in the future, “E-book readers will be preferable to books; books will still be preferable to e-books."

Nancy F. Cott (page not found), acting as moderator, then opened the floor up for questions. First up was the issue of how lending and copyright might be managed by a future “national digital library." The books made downloadable by Google thus far have only been those whose copyright has expired, but most texts, especially the more important ones, still fall in the domain of copyright protection. Darnton responded by citing the example of Brewster Kahle's new Open Library initiative, which simulates physical lending through digital copies that self-destruct after two weeks. This, Darnton maintained, would be one way to make books under copyright available to patrons of digital libraries.

The next two questions, combined, focused on changing modes of engagement with digital text, not only in the form of reading, but also of writing and creating e-books. As with the songs in Poetry and the Police, Darnton speculated that future writing for e-book formats would maximize multimedia's multisensory capabilities, as well as encourage non-linearity through hyperlinks; he cited, as an example, projects supported by the AHA's Gutenberg-e Program. Shieber noted, however, that although devices themselves could enable non-linearity, research suggests that linearity remains the rule of human cognition. Attention is a linear phenomenon, and non-linear reading ends up being organized—“linearized”—as we process and sort information. At this point, Nancy Cott interjected to ask whether this linear mode of cognition would itself change due to the e-book. Shieber responded that while this was possible over evolutionary time scales, it would be unlikely to see any differences in the foreseeable future. Darnton, tending more towards a more radical notion of human plasticity, raised examples from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains to argue that digital media might, in fact, be rewiring our very neural pathways.

Talk of the future, then, but what about antecedents in the past? It was on this note that Adrian Johns (page not found) took to the podium for the first full panel of the day, dedicated to the topic "Storage and Retrieval." Picking up on Darnton's invocation of a "national digital library," Johns called our attention to various attempts to realize "universal libraries" in the age of early modern print (see Piracy, pp. 216–220). Focusing on England, Johns recounted struggles between libraries, printers, and authors over the principle of deposit, dating back to a private agreement in 1610 between the Bodleian Library and the Stationers' Company, wherein a copy of every new book printed by members of the Company would be deposited in the Bodleian collection. The Statute of Anne(1710) incorporated this as part of copyright law, requiring that a copy of every registered book be deposited at nine chosen libraries—mostly university libraries—across a newly-formed Britain.

What followed was a protracted battle between printers and authors, on the one hand, and libraries, on the other. Libraries aspired to an Enlightenment ideal of universal knowledge, collecting and making accessible all printed works to create a repository of "public reason." Printers, meanwhile, viewed the deposit requirement grudgingly as a kind of tax levied on their products in exchange for copyright protection. In order to avoid this "tax," printers did not register books that were unlikely to be pirated—books that likely did not require formal legal protection. This meant that in many cases, genuine works of scholarship, with small print runs and low risk of piracy, were never copyrighted, and therefore never deposited in these “universal libraries.” Furthermore, authors emerging under the Romantic movement viewed the deposit requirement in their own right as a "tax on genius." Real genius, they believed, was unpopular, and produced small print runs; having to give away nine copies on a run of, say, fifty total copies thus became a significant obstacle to the publication and circulation of their work. The combination of copyright with the drive towards universal public knowledge, then, created a situation that arguably stymied "genius," and left only popular works of mass mediocrity sitting on library shelves. In Johns' words, "the demand to collect knowledge would result in destroying it." This was, ultimately, the flaw in universal libraries. For public reason to work, Johns claimed, one needed also to have private spaces, spaces into which one could retreat as an autonomous individual to unconnect or disconnect.

This historical episode in the history of the universal library reveals that the idea of the library—its "final cause," in Johns' Aristotelian vocabulary—was intimately bound with the maintenance of knowledge, public intelligence, and public reason. By examining this "final cause," we can discern that while the mass scanning project of Google Books may seem remarkably similar to the project of universal libraries, the two are fundamentally different: Google's library explicitly rejects "public knowledge" as its defining purpose. In Johns' account, the ultimate goal of Google's library is not for "display use," i.e. human reading, but to amass data for "non-display uses," i.e., to be processed by machines. Data-mining and non-display uses pose a wholly new question as to the nature of publication, authorship, and the very meaning of the library—the meaning, as such, of "knowledge" itself. Johns ended by exhorting us to reflect upon this uncharted territory of ethics and epistemology.

Up next, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (page not found) shifted our attention from the ethics and epistemology implied by the library to the ethic, epistemology, and even very ontology of archives in the digital age. Published works today are almost all "born digital," in the sense that they are created, edited, laid out, etc., all in digital environments; with the rise of reading devices, they are furthermore circulated through a digital world. This first creates a quantitative difference of archival materials. Kindle offers scholars new sources such as popular highlights, plot summaries, memorable quotes customer reviews, and further recommendations; the laptops and hard drives of writers offer us draft upon saved draft, Web browsing histories and on-line conversations. Yet this quantitative difference also marks a qualitative shift: the nature of "evidence" has changed, migrating onto disks, drives, laptops, USB sticks, confronting us with the fact that writers of the born-digital age cannot be studied in the same way as those of prior days. Punning off former advisor Jerome McGann's The Textual Condition, Kirschenbaum called this the ".txtual condition," where primary records are no longer coterminous with (or at least commensurate to) the actual physical artifacts that bear them, and where whole lives are laid out in the reflecting pool of a writer's personal computer.

In our time, when four of Salman Rushdie's computers are archived at Emory University, what new skill sets are required of humanistic scholars? To answer this, Kirschenbaum reminded the audience that digital media are, in their own way, still insistently material, in no way more fragile or vanishing than any other form of inscription. The way to understand them lies in the emerging field of digital forensics as a specific curatorial practice. Originally used in the fields of national defense, law enforcement, and security agencies to discover and authenticate data to make it admissible in legal settings, digital forensics will become an essential tool by which scholars can reconstruct lost or deleted versions of manuscripts, trace digital “hands” and lineages in the same way they once attempted to read various signs of script forgery. Raising the example of faulty time stamps on files, Kirschebaum explained how researchers will have to learn how to cope with digital “tampering” and other difficulties posed by the intersecting levels of computational individualization and abstraction, moving layer by layer between the specifics of hardware to the virtual environment of software. The set of material negotiations the scholar faces here are not only technical in nature, but also social, a realm Kirschenbaum identified as probably the greatest challenge facing future research. Today, websites and e-mails are already scattered across servers around the globe, and data a kind of “property” imbricated in complex matrices of ownership. Scholars within the .txtual condition will have to learn how to deal with terms of service agreements, end user license agreements, and changing forms of intellectual property, in addition to acquiring knowledge of digital forensics.

Though wildly different in their methods, these two presentations by Johns and Kirschenbaum set the stage for a question and answer session characterized by broader philosophical considerations concerning the relationship between technology and the humanities, in particular the problem, so forcefully raised by Kirschenbaum, of what new skill sets should be required of a new generation of humanists. Johns reinforced this point by returning to a question posed to Darnton and Shieber: how writing will change with digital media. Johns noted that writing e-books was as epistemologically limiting as it was epistemologically liberating. E-books certainly allow for that type of multimedia experience championed by Darnton; at the same time, they can be incredibly time-consuming for little gain, and, in the process, one faces the danger of allowing technological frameworks to redefine the nature of one's own inquiry. To successfully navigate these straits, humanities students must acquire higher levels of technical knowledge. Johns thus echoed Kirschenbaum's support for the field of digital humanities, while simultaneously cautioning digital humanists to avoid, in Johns' words, "self-ghettoizing," a common problem for emergent fields that overbid for their own disciplinary autonomy.

A similar trope of caution and middle paths was evident in Kirschenbaum's characterization of a "sweet spot" between complexity of argument and manageability of evidence. Evidence seems to be overflowing due to new, individually-customizable forms of social media such as Web 2.0. The question of how to store it, how to use it, and also what to throw away is crucial. Whether a tweet should be saved or deleted, then, is a question about what constitutes the ephemera of our era. Here, Johns reminded the audience that it was really ephemera that economically sustained the printing industry. The choice as to what to save and what to throw away faces this contradiction that some of the most important lynchpins of the production cycle are also those things most readily disposable.

Finally, the conversation over pedagogy turned back towards ethics. How do we distinguish between the digital forensics of FBI agents versus those of the Rushdie scholar? Kirschenbaum answered quickly that privacy was a keyword of current debates, and all citizens of a networked world have a responsibility to educate themselves on their options for privacy management. Johns echoed and elaborated this by distinguishing between different senses of privacy as they related to conceptions of the individual. Many technocratic communities, he noted, tended towards a libertarian, neoclassical conception of the “self” in negative relief—as a domain of private interests asserted against the public. Johns called instead for a restoration of the Kantian sense of the individual as citizen, and bearer of civic duties. We have not yet developed a clear notion of the "responsibilities of readers" for the altered conditions of digital reading. What are our duties as readers of the digital? What types of skills will we need to be active, engaged citizens on the lookout? In addition to empirical studies, Johns said, a new theory of readerly responsibility is a philosophical necessity for the future humanities.

Thus the morning sessions of the "Why Books?" conference left the audience with the task to rethink reading, writing, researching, and teaching amidst a shift, complementary and competitive at once, towards digital books. Darnton, Shieber, Johns, and Kirschenbaum provided solid shoulders. As if to rise to the occasion, the audience ceased their sitting, stood, and adjourned for lunch.

Session II: Circulation and Transmission

Write-up by Lispeth Nutt (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard)

Moderator:
David D. Hall (broken link), Bartlett Research Professor of New England Church History, Harvard Divinity School

Panelists:
Isabel Hofmeyr (broken link), Head of the Discipline of African Literature and Professor, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand
“Indian Ocean Books”

Meredith L. McGill, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
“Print Outside the Book”

The first panelist Isabel Hofmeyr, from the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, presented her talk on “Indian Ocean Books” as part of a larger critique of dominant economic models for the production, circulation, and social impact of the book—although much of the theoretical background for this critique was implied rather than directly detailed. Hofmeyr seemed to assume that much of the audience would already understand the kinds of models that provide the context for her work—models which emphasize the role of profit considerations and large-scale political leverage in relating the printed word to constructions of nationalism and personal identity.

Toward the end of her talk, Hofmeyr compared her own theoretical framework to Sheldon Pollock's theory of “script-mercantilism.” Much of Pollock’s work is framed as a critique of the idea of “print-capitalism” as formulated by Benedict Anderson. Anderson1 argues that nationalism arose at the end of the eighteenth century as an almost direct result of the extension of access to script languages through the mechanism of the printing press operating within a capitalist framework. According to Anderson, the dissemination of printed literature, and the development of the technologies of print more in general, were directly connected to the formulation of the “imagined communities” necessary for the creation of modern nation-states. In contrast to this, Pollock writes that:

The true watershed in the history of communicative media, in India at least, was the invention not of print-capitalism but of script-mercantilism of the sort found in both Sanskrit and vernacular cultures. This manuscript culture was enormously productive and efficient. . . . Continuing oral performance practices, their reproducibility enhanced by comparatively stable text-artifacts, magnified the impact of script-mercantilism to produce a dissemination of the culture-power ideas of the India epics greater than anything achievable through print-capitalism.2

Hofmeyr, in turn, wants to formulate a model of “print-mercantilism” that demonstrates the impact of smaller-scale presses that were largely dependent upon patronage, merchant support, and philanthropy (rather than profit-creation). Such smaller-scale presses existed in networked relation to one another up and down the African coast of the Indian Ocean. Beyond their size and economic status, Hofmeyr identified a number of additional “family resemblances” among these presses: They were all transnational enterprises invested in modernist ideas of national reform that were either unconcerned with or in direct hostility to copyright law and who did not generally view books as “commodities embedded in market relationships.”

The primary example upon which Hofmeyr's talk focused was the press established by Mohandas Gandhi, who was, of course, deeply involved in the printing of both newspapers and books. The press was located on Gandhi’s first ashram and was a cooperative venture of the settlement's residents. These residents hailed from all over South Africa, India, and England, and each contributed his or her own expertise and cultural proclivities. Although the press was originally set up on a more “traditional” profit-driven model, Gandhi terminated the “jobbing” section of the press in 1906 and ended the printing of all advertisements soon afterward. Gandhi intended his press to be a “publisher of Indian printing” pure and simple. Such a press operated, according to Hofmeyr, as a dramatization of a new utopian society in which everyone—regardless of nationality, religion, class or gender—dirtied their hands in pursuit of a common idea.

The second presentation of the session by Meredith McGill, an associate professor of English and the Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, was entitled “Print Outside the Book.” It focused on the African American poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who participated in the abolitionist movement largely through the composition and recitation of poems meant to produce pragmatic, emotional responses within their audiences. Although Harper has retained a place within African American history, her poems have been largely forgotten by the modern community of literary critics. McGill suggests that this neglect results from a disregard for the particularity of Harper's poems’ format. These works were not composed with the intention of being read all together in chronological order within a formally published compendium. Rather, they were presented within pamphlets and chapbooks, or reprinted within the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Such presentations were meant to reproduce the contingency of oral performance, not to facilitate continuous silent reading among book owners.

Harper, as a freeborn Black woman, operated in a kind of border state—at least from the perspective of white society, whose members needed an object of identification to add authenticity to their call for abolition, but who simultaneously would have reacted with chagrin to the personage of an actual slave. I think that McGill would like to argue that poetry as a genre operates as a similar kind of transition space between reading and performance, and thus itself resists our assumptions about the modality of printed text.

Embedded within McGill's apologia for Harper as a legitimate member of the taught “canon,” there was also a critique of the assumption that “the book” is an adequate “synecdoche” (McGill's word choice) for the multitude of potential forms and formats that literature can take. Thus, when people claim that digital media presents a crisis for “the book,” McGill would respond that print medium encompasses too many variations for all of these forms to be equally threatened. The boundaries of literary form have always been “porous and shifting,” encompassing a wider range of formats and purposes than often considered by grandiose references to “the book.”

1. Anderson's major work is in this regard is Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, [1983] 1991.

2. Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006) 558.

Session III: Reception and Use

Write-up by Lispeth Nutt (Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Harvard)

Moderator:
Homi K. Bhabha RI ’05 (broken link), Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Panelists:
Paul Duguid, Adjunct Professor, University of California at Berkeley School of Information
“The World According to GREP:search in Context”

Elizabeth Long, Department Chair and Professor of Sociology, Rice University
“Loving Books in the Digital Age”

The title of the first talk of this session (by Paul Duguid of the U.C. Berkeley School of Information) might leave the less technologically-savvy with a blank look on their faces: “The World According to GREP: Search in Context.” GREP is an acronym for “global regular expression print,” which is the powerful search tool originally built for Unix-based software in 1973. It allows users to search for any specifiable “string,” and, through this capacity, it has become the wind under the wings of the Internet. The acronym is, in fact, important enough to have achieved mention as both a noun and a verb in that great curator of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (the on-line edition, anyway):

grep, n.
A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified sequence or pattern, and to output all the lines matching this.
grep, v.
1. intr. To search for a string of characters using the grep command. Also trans.: to search (a file) in this way.
2. trans. slang (usu. humorous). Of a person: to search; to scan visually.

One example given by the OED of the second verbal usage is: “I've seen people grepping the phone book to, say, find all the pizza places in a 10-mile radius that deliver and offer pineapple topping.” (Sounds like a good idea.) At any rate, early digital search tools all relied on a GREP algorithm, but Google superseded earlier searchers like Alta Vista and Yahoo by jettisoning the standard hierarchical orderings and rankings of documents, providing users with a more horizontal intertextual interface. This renunciation of hierarchy is, in fact, reflective of Google's grand operating philosophy—a philosophy built upon the idea that information and text (we might wonder whether these are really the same thing) are resources which, for maximal use, ought to be free of all constraints. And it is exactly such philosophical assumptions that Duguid wishes to examine and critique.

A quote placed early in Duguid's talk drew giggles from the crowd: Books are merely “tree flakes encased in dead cow” to which people are unduly attached. He might just as appropriately have quoted a now fairly common technogeek idiom: “You can't grep dead trees,” i.e. you can much more easily search through digital resources than through their hard copy counterparts. Information is “trapped” by the constraints of such outdated media, and that information “wants” to be free. And who will be the liberator? Technology, of course.

Such arguments, utopian as they may be, not only conflate information access with knowledge acquisition, they are also based upon a kind of Neo-Darwinian teleology of which Duguid is highly skeptical. Technology certainly develops, but, if we don't understand the old mediums, the new ones cannot escape their problems nor improve upon their strengths. Furthermore, humans are, in fact, “enormously perverse” (from the perspective of an engineer), since we have a proclivity for turning seeming constraints into tools for building structures of authority, comprehension, and confidence.

Throughout Duguid's talk, the Google Books Project served as Exhibit A for the issues involved in the radical open-source/Web 2.0 revolution. The challenges presented to Google in its quest to build the ultimate library have been discussed by Duguid before. In an article published in 2007, he wrote:

The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also. . . a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable. Curiously, this suggests to me that it may be Google’s technicians, and not librarians, who are the great romanticisers of the book. Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things... [I]n trying to do away with fairly simple constraints (like volumes), [Google's] strategies underestimate how a book’s rigidities are often simultaneously resources deeply implicated in the ways in which authors and publishers sought to create the content, meaning, and significance that Google now seeks to liberate. Even with some of the best search and scanning technology in the world behind you, it is unwise to ignore the bookish character of books. More generally, transferring any complex communicative artifacts between generations of technology is always likely to be more problematic than automatic.1

The Google Books interface does not distinguish between lists of figures and tables of contents; it is not sensitive to works composed in multiple volumes; it does not discriminate for the sake of its readers between well- and poorly-edited editions of the same work. In short, by rejecting books' unwieldy materiality, it also loses their capacity to attach themselves to an accumulation of human expertise that cannot be replaced by a search algorithm. An “open” information environment that is indifferent to hierarchy actually demonstrates the many ways in which the “shackles” of the past are not always so shackle-like.

* * * * * * * *

The second speaker of the session was Elizabeth Long from Rice University. She used her presentation (“Loving Books in the Digital Age”) to report, in an admittedly anecdotal way, upon the self-reports of both Kindle and “old school” printed book users. Many of the partisans of the tome fell back upon somewhat expected references to the “sensuous pleasures of handling a book,” but a number of more surprising considerations were also raised. In the name of (over)simplification, I have organized a number of the notable testimonies into a handy pair of lists:

Pro-Kindle

E-readers are easy to transport, and can therefore function as travel accessories.
E-readers offer instant gratification. . . if you choose the kind of books that are available on the Kindle and its kin.
E-readers allow their users to indulge in fantasies of a simple life, one that is no longer awash in material objects.
E-readers are particularly useful for masking the identity of texts (such as romance novels!) that might otherwise cause embarrassment for their readers.
In a particularly specific example, Long described how one dyslexic young man was able to use the audio function of his Kindle to “read” academic texts.
In another specific example, a woman with a nerve disease was able to reengage with reading through her Kindle, thanks to the ease of “turning” pages and isolating passages on the device.

Pro-Print

Printed books serve as a repository of treasured memories and as a souvenir of the emotions that we experienced when we read them.
Our bookshelves full of titles help define and announce our identities. . . . Without the physical bookshelf, how will get to know one another's literary selves?
Printed books, unlike a Kindle, can be lent—both by one person to another and within a library system. The latter context also provides an environment in which like-minded individuals can meet and chat about the texts they are reading.
Printed books can be signed by their authors!
The format itself of a book allows for a broader range of reading techniques than simply reading a text from beginning to end: the reader can flip back and forth, judge how much remains in a chapter, or skip ahead to the end. (In this sense, e-readers actually resemble a papyrus more than a codex.)
Printed books allow for efficient annotation, be it in the form of margin notes or dog-eared pages.
Printed books can vary meaningfully in format and presentation; on an e-reader, every text looks exactly the same.
How do you cite an e-book?
At least at present, the available selection of e-books is driven more by demand than by scholarly protocols.
Purchasing printed books supports independent booksellers.

Based upon a comparison of the length of these lists, we might conclude that printed books have “won” the debate. However, Long would probably object to the entire premise of my sharply separated registers. While the move to the digital book opens up new vistas in textual experience, so did the move to the printed book, and there is no reason to expect that one medium will replace the other. I would suspect that many Kindle users are, in fact, among the most devoted readers of print books. Assuming that one medium must dominate the other assumes that all texts are read for the same purpose under the same circumstances. Furthermore, as Long pointed out, e-readers are themselves objects; despite the reveries of their promoters, Kindles and the like cannot completely escape the confines of materiality.

1. From the conclusion of: “Inheritance or Loss? A Brief Survey of Google Books.” First Monday, 2007 12(8). A number of other articles written recently by Paul Duguid are also available online. See: “Search before GREP: A Progress from Open to Closed?” in Konrad Becker & Felix Stalder, eds., Deep Search.Vienna: Studienverlag, 2009 and “Limits of Self-Organization: Peer Production and the ‘Laws of Quality’.” First Monday, 2006: 11(10).