Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times by Andrew Piper (review)

Along with gods and cigarettes, books are the perfect commodity. We tend to forget the degree to which our modern business world has been shaped by books. The book trade was one of the first to introduce hourly wage labour; the presentation of food in supermarkets – masses of identical items on accessible shelves featuring clearly identifiable product descriptions and brand names – is modelled on bookstore displays; and with its early combination of ISBNs and machine-readable bar codes, the book trade pioneered modern processing techniques. Jeff Bezos did not found Amazon.com out of love for reading but because books are among the most easily distributable consumer goods. On the other hand, books are hallowed receptacles of values and Bildung. Since this elevated position appears to be tied to their status as print objects, their impending electronic remediation is viewed with great unease. The digitization of books is said to be to culture what the barbarian invasions were to Rome. In short, books are the ultimate consumer item: flawlessly taylorized yet ineffably unique. Maybe, when he was exploring the mysteries of commodity fetishism, Karl Marx was simply reflecting on what he was doing: writing a book.

This peculiar split is partly to blame for decades of a binary rhetoric that either recoils in horror or writhes in ecstasy when prophesying the imminent demise of printed books. We either intonate elegies for the Gutenberg Galaxy or celebrate the digital conquest of “the last bastion of analog” (to quote Bezos). Andrew Piper does not play this game, he refuses to don the garb of either Jeremiah or John the Baptist, and while he is not the first to transcend this simple binary, he offers one of the most thoughtful, reflective, and stimulating contributions (not to mention one of the most elegantly written). He carefully dissolves the reified concepts that have come to determine the common appreciation of books. The book does not exist, and neither does reading as such. Instead, we have many diverse interactions between texts and readers “that span several domains of sensory and physical experience” (154). These domains are explored across seven chapters. No short review can do full justice to the delicate way in which Piper unfolds an ecology of literal and metaphorical practices, skills, aptitudes, habits, and encounters arising either from basic connections between books and faces (25–44), books and trees (109–29), and books and numbers (131–49) or from gestures as simple as holding – and thus also being held by – a book (1–23) or turning pages, be they paper or screen (45–61). Piper delicately reads the many ways in which we read books; as a result, reading is revealed as an activity that is not linked to any particular time or carrier and thus straddles media boundaries. Books, therefore, came before and will follow after what we conventionally assume to be the age of books, hence the title (a Gertrude Stein quote) Book Was There; hence also the assurance that “[b]ooks will always be there” (xi).

There is a wistful domesticity to Piper’s writing, enhanced by descriptions of his bedtime reading to his children. It may sound touching, but Piper is too knowledgeable a scholar of Romantic inscription programs to fall for his own idyll. Our refined, book-based Innerlichkeit is rooted in an isolation that precludes communion in reading. “Reading is a technique of socialization with a deeply asocial element” (85). The price we pay for a sensitive literacy capable of experiencing the multifaceted reading acts Piper describes is an insurmountable separation of minds, no matter how intimate the surroundings. “When I share my books with my children, I will be sharing the limits of sharing. Books are the original difference engines” (108). However, Piper keeps a tight leash on this engine. For all his emphasis on differentiation and ecological variety, he tends to adhere to a Western model of reading, and he avoids its...