Book Was There
Reading in Electronic Times
Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member of the first digital generation – and the father of two digital natives – he understands that we live in electronic times".Book Was There" is Piper's surprising and always entertaining essay on reading in an e-reader world.
Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books, but Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books, print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today's playable media and interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read, while also observing his own children as they face the struggles and triumphs of learning to read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials – how we hold them, look at them, share them, play with them, and even where we read them – and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading's many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will – and will not – change old habits.
Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, "Book Was There" is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.
Content
Prologue: Nothing Is Ever New
1. Take It and Read
2. Face, Book
3. Turning the Page (Roaming, Zooming, Streaming)
4. Of Note
5. Sharing
6. Among the Trees
7. By the Numbers
Epilogue: Letting Go of the Book
Notes
About the Author
Andrew Piper is professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the author of "Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age" and "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times", both published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also a founding member of the Multigraph Collective, a group of twenty-two scholars that recently published "Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation", also with the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"This is a deep and delightful performance, elucidating the multiple, shifting, overlapping ways that embodied persons interact with books. Like Walter Benjamin, Andrew Piper is able to filter vast learning through a distinctive writerly sensibility: whether he meditates on the computability of texts, the uses of handwriting, the faces of Facebook, or the varieties of annotation, he is a companionable and erudite guide. 'Book Was There' is a book to return to: its provocations and illuminations multiply with each visit" – Alan Jacobs, author of "The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction"
"At last, not an elegy for the book, whose reported death as material object has been greatly exaggerated, but the retooling of the computer screen itself as a rearview mirror on the perennial nature – and mystery – of reading. As down to earth as it is up to the minute, this is the book on bookishness we've needed, dispatched with unpedantic ease and brio, fast, aphoristic, and repeatedly eye-opening. Andrew Piper has plumbed the history of reading and produced a true page-turner on the legacy and fate of the page. Learned and witty throughout, 'Book Was There' instructs in the delights of reading, on screen as well as off, by reproducing them anew in every phase of its meditation" – Garrett Stewart, author of "Bookwork"
"An exquisite book, richly informed and wonderfully alert to both the riches of the past experience of reading and its potential for the future. Andrew Piper shows that what we think of as reading has always formed part of a wider range of activities and experiences, individual and collective – and never more so than now, as the page gives way to the screen. 'Book Was There' has an enormous amount to offer anyone interested in the ways we use texts now and the many ways we have done so in the past" – Anthony Grafton, author of "Worlds Made by Words"
"This series of enlightening meditations on the experience and history of reading reveals what we are poised to gain and to lose with the advent of e-readers and related digital media... Often striking an audacious lyrical tone, he displays a remarkable sensitivity to the ways in which humans have historically talked about and understood reading. As such, Piper does a fine job of uncovering the metaphors on which the rationality and logic of reading rest... A fascinating glance at the page as it was, as it is, and as it might yet be" – Publishers Weekly
