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

Andrew Piper’s book makes an intervention in the ongoing debate about the future of reading under the conditions of the “digital humanities.” Rather than providing yet another “print eulogy” or celebrating “digital utopias” (xi), Piper seeks to establish a better frame for the problem of reading in electronic times. By shifting the terms of the debate away from the binary of old media versus new media, Piper presents a perspective of interaction and entanglement: how can we as readers understand the relationship between books and screens? How can we gauge the impact of different physical media on our ways of reading, with reading being a cultural and embodied practice?

Piper’s radically reframed question of reading in terms of interacting physical media technologies makes his book an important contribution, yet from the perspective of method, it is not as singular as he claims (“We do not have as yet a survey that takes reading quite so experientially seriously as this one,” xiii). Other existing studies, such as work by Michael Cahn, Lorraine Daston, and Anthony Grafton, prioritize material form over content in the history of reading, providing the bridge between media studies and book history that Piper sees lacking. Thus, what distinguishes Piper’s book is not the underlying method but its application: at once stringent and creative, Piper concentrates on a set of very basic reading practices in conjunction with changing material media. As a result, Book Was There is a slim and elegant read of sweeping scope, literally spanning from antiquity to today on not even 200 pages.

Argumentatively, Piper taps the recent trend of “media ecologies” in order to bring the fundamental media-historical insight to bear that media never replace one another cleanly over the course of time but interact with each other in shared environments. He argues that “electronic reading has a very deep bibliographic history” (ix) that we ought to explore if we want to understand reading’s future. To uncover this bibliographic history between reading electronic media and reading books, Piper goes through several core modes of interacting with reading matter. In each of his seven chapters, he thus focuses on “something we do when we read,” describing reading practices “at the most elementary of levels,” that is, “the level of person, habit, and gesture” (xiii). He starts out with what it means to hold books and other reading matter in one’s hands (Ch. 1) and then discusses the practices of looking at books and screens (Ch. 2); turning pages, roaming, zooming, and streaming (Ch. 3); note-taking (Ch. 4); sharing books and electronic texts (Ch. 5); reading in special places such as the outdoors (Ch. 6); and counting (Ch. 7), a practice of which most scholars would presumably not think immediately in this context but that turns out to have deep connections to reading.

One great strength of Piper’s account is that his investigations of these very concrete practices segue to more abstract concepts. Beginning with a fundamental, often phenomenological description of a particular medium or reading practice, Piper introduces abstraction in order to draw larger conclusions about the medium or the practice’s place in cultural history. For example, in the chapter on note-taking, Piper complicates the relationship between reading, note-taking, and writing through a set of essential observations on handwriting. Since the advent of print, the difference between printed books and handwritten notes has been clear. Yet what happens, Piper asks, when reading, writing, and note-taking occur in the same medium (the computer), a medium in which “all is note?” His answer is unequivocal: we lose not only handwriting and its cognitive benefits of bringing the mental faculties for drawing and writing together, but we lose an entire means of differentiation. We lose the “material articulation of serial difference,” that is, the insight that “writing, like thought, nature, and the self to which it gives expression, must be understood as a form...