Book Was There ? Reading in Electronic Times (a first printing)

Piper, Andrew

ISBN 10: 0226669785 / ISBN 13: 9780226669786

Published by University of Chicago Press,usa, 2012

About this Item

us1st.edition.1st.printing.near fine hardback in near fine dustwrapper.

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Bibliographic Details

• Title: Book Was There ? Reading in Electronic Times (a first printing)
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press,usa
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226669785
• ISBN 13: 9780226669786
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Andrew Piper is professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the author of Enumerations: Data and Literary Study, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age and Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, all 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.