The Book

The MIT Press Essential Knowledge

by Amaranth Borsuk

The book as object, as content, as idea, as interface.

What is the book in a digital age? Is it a physical object containing pages encased in covers? Is it a portable device that gives us access to entire libraries? The codex, the book as bound paper sheets, emerged around 150 CE. It was preceded by clay tablets and papyrus scrolls. Are those books? In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Amaranth Borsuk considers the history of the book, the future of the book, and the idea of the book. Tracing the interrelationship of form and content in the book's development, she bridges book history, book arts, and electronic literature to expand our definition of an object we thought we knew intimately.

Contrary to the many reports of its death (which has been blamed at various times on newspapers, television, and e-readers), the book is alive. Despite nostalgic paeans to the codex and its printed pages, Borsuk reminds us, the term “book” commonly refers to both medium and content. And the medium has proved to be malleable. Rather than pinning our notion of the book to a single form, Borsuk argues, we should remember its long history of transformation. Considering the book as object, content, idea, and interface, she shows that the physical form of the book has always been the site of experimentation and play. Rather than creating a false dichotomy between print and digital media, we should appreciate their continuities.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Books About Books, Adult, Writing, Audiobook, Librarianship

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lucruri de mult știute: papirus, pergament, hîrtie. Înscripții notate în piatră, pe oase, pe tăblițe de lut, pe scoarță de copac. Carte în formă de rotulus, de codex. Lectura cu voce tare (în Antichitate și în Evul Mediu), lectura numai cu ochii în modernitate. Problemele pe care le ridică lectura cărților „virtuale” etc.

Așadar, o istorie minimală a cărții, scrierii și lecturii.

[ana · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book by chance the other day and thought it could be useful for my PhD research. And even though I am familiar with almost everything Borsuk says and the authors she mentions, it has to be acknowledged that it is a very insightful book about the book per se, not only as an artifact but also as idea from its very conception thousands of years ago to the most current present. Written in a scholarly but informational way, I think many might find it a really interesting reading, especially if interested about the use and idea of the book and its past, present and/or future. For me, it helped clarifying some ideas, which I found really valuable.

[Nelson Zagalo · Rating 2 out of 5]

"The Book" saiu em 2018, publicado pela respeitada editora académica MIT Press, apresentando uma curta história do formato livro, da pedra aos ecrãs, por Amaranth Borsuk. Podia ser uma boa introdução à história do objeto, que é, mas acaba não passando de uma introdução descritiva, em que faltam competências no contar de histórias, nomeadamente, falta rasgo em dar conta da verdadeira relevância do objeto na História da nossa espécie.

Contudo, tudo o que temos neste livro, e tudo o resto, pode ser encontrado num outro livro publicado em 2019, "O Infinito num Junco" de Irene Vallejo.

[Alya AlShaibani · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Katerina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean isn't it hilarious that I wanted a documentary version instead.

[ØMVЯ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspirational details over the human history of information mediums. Wish the ancient techniques were discussed more yet still learned the word 'verbicate' - the act of marking words for effect such as capitalization. Additionally, Gutenburg evidently only invented a more efficient printing press rather than the method of printing itself which was used before his time. The man was also greatly indebted and forced to close business, post-humorously attributed with his work.

[Alejandro Teruel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The justification and the goal of this interesting book are set out succintly in its preface:

At a moment when the dual subjects of the death of the book and the future of books (two halves of the same debate) have taken hold of popular interest, where paeans to print fetishing the sensory pleasures of books are published alongside encomiums on the storytelling capabilities of virtual reality, many of us want a better sense of what a book is and has been -and what it may become […] My goal in this short work is to bring together several perspectives on the book that illuminate its long history of transformation.

Borsuk sensibly starts out by broadly reviewing what a book has been, writings on wax and clay tablets, parchment and payrus scrolls, bamboo strips, knotted cords, paper codices, e-books. In her brief history she emphasizes the affordances provided by the technologies of hand-written and printed books in a way which elegantly reviews key concepts and properties of books in their different manifestations, very properly reminding us that even if the medium is not necessarily the message, there is a socio-technology of media that certain affects the properties of books and how text is used.

In the first chapter (The Book as Object) provides an overview of the history of the book as “...a portable data storage and distribution method.” up to the the verge of the invention of the printed book. She follows Frederick Kilgour’s ideas on the development of the book as:

...a series of “punctuated equilibria” driven by “the ever-increasing informational needs of society” -a useful way of thinking about the book’s transformations. Different technologies of the book exist side by side throughout its history: tablet and scroll, scroll and codex, manuscript and print, paperback and e-book. Looking at the changing object of the book gives us a deeper sense of the history of relations between form and content that help define it.

The author insightfully reminds us that, as far as we know, Plato was the first to express the fear that books would impoverish intellectual development, by qualitatively reducing reliance on memory and by preventing the intellectual to engage with his interlocutors and defend his ideas:

[These concerns] echo contemporary anxieties about the ways digitally mediated reading and writing shortens our attention spans and ability to engage deeply with texts. The thing we fear is precisely what worried the ancients: mediation[…] It bears emphasizing that writing itself fundamentally changed human consciousness, much as our reliance on networked digital devices has altered us at the core.

In chapter 2 (The Book as Content), Borsuk takes up the history of the book from the invention of the printing up to the twentieth century:

The early years of the printed codex thus mark both an important technological shift (the mechanical reproduction of text) and a philosophical one in terms of how we relate to books. At this point they became the intimate spaces we know expect them to be, whether guiding one through the stations of daily devotion or conveying ancient thought on the structure of tragedy.

The author frequently ´points out commonplace myths about books. Printing may have helped usher in “the perception that books are little worlds enclosed in covers”, however she gently but ironically disabuses us of the myth of an inherent superiority of reading over, say, watching television:

We think of ourselves as disappearing into [books], only to emerge hours later, changed by what we have read. Pundits frequently draw on this romance of disembodiment as a contrast to the passivity of television, characterized as a kind of vegetative state. Even in this vanguard moment of complex televised drama, the stigma remains: We would be better people if we disappeared into books instead.

This chapter also includes an important section on the changing notions of copyright during the same period.

Chapter 3 (The Book as Idea) is the key chapter of the book. After covering the history of the book in order to highlight the the affordances provided by their different material manifestations, Borsuk focuses on her most intriguing preface promise:

[...T]his guide points to continuities, positioning the book as a changing technology and highlighting the way artists in the twentieth and twenty-first century have pushed us to rethink and redefine the term […] I take the artist’s book, which uses its content to interrogate book form, as an instructive paradigm for thinking about the way forward for digital books.

Artists' books are expressly conceived as works of art in their own right:

Such self-referential and self-aware objects have much to teach us about the changing nature of the book, in part because they highlight the “idea” by paradoxically drawing attention to the “object” we have come to take for granted. They disrupt our treatment of the book as a transparent container for literary and aesthetic “content” and engage its material form in the work’s meaning[…] These works interrogate the codex, calling into question how books communicate and how we read, using every aspect of their structure, form, and content to make meaning.

For example, in what sense is a book filled with blank pages, such as Craig Dworkin’s No Medium a book? What is the difference between a book and a newspaper? Stephane Mallarmé used contemporary newsprint to extend the frontiers of poetry in Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le Hazard (A throw of dice will never abolish chance):

He planned each page carefully, scoring it as one might a piece of music, with words and phrases scattered fragmentarily across each spread […] Eschewing the tradition of contained stanzas surrounded by white margins, he dispersed the text, alllowing space to play an expressive role so “that it seems to sometimes accelerate and slow the movement, articulating it, even intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the page.” Dropping punctuation, using multiple type sizes to emphasize particular words, and interspersing phrases in all caps with those in lower case, he guides the reader’s eye through the text, with special attention to the interaction between facing pages.

. What about blowing up the size of a book so that you can actually crawl through it? An example of how artists books anticipate digital books is explained, in somewhat cumbersome terms as:

While we might presume the ability to rearrange a book’s parts is an affordance reserved for the digital realm, artists’ books showcase several historical forms that turn the book into a recombinant structure, allowing readers to create new juxtapositions within it.

A simple example of this idea is Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (Rayuela, 1963), a classic experimental latinamerican novel (not mentioned by Borsuk) that can be read linearly from start to finish or whose chapters can be read in other orders (Cortázar provides another such alternative reading order). Another, even more extreme example is Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poemes (1961), a book whose pages are cut along the books spine, sliced along the lines of fourteen Petrarchan sonnets. By flipping the page slices separately, 10 to the fourteen different poems can be generated.

Borsuk clearly loves artists books and she provides an excellent, if highly personal introduction to them. They resonate and make you wonder, but a nagging question remains, in what sense are they “an instructive paradigm for thinking about the way forward for digital books.”? I certainly concede that her use of artists' books does help shake up preconceptions or habitudes about what a book is, and in this sense she encourages the reader to approach the possible future of books with a more open mind. In this chapter at least, she opens up vistas, but she eschews signposts -which may be, or not, a good thing, when looking at the future.

Chapter 4 (The Book as Interface) starts by recapitulating a different meaning for books from the one set out in the first chapter. Although Borsuk started out in her first chapter by describing a book as “...a portable data storage and distribution device”, perhaps the emphasis on data is not quite right. By this chapter, she has shifted, or rather gradually argued in favor of another description:

...the book is an idea we have of a bounded text, issued into the world through the power of publication, and able to take any number of physical forms, dependent upon the needs of its content and its reader or the whims of its author. It is essentially an interface through which we encounter ideas. [my italics] Its materiality need have no bearing on its content, yet whenever we hold a codex book, we are subconsciously drawing on a history of physical and embodied interaction that has taught us to recognize and manipulate it[…] The book accomodates us, and we accomodate to it.

In this chapter Borsuk delves into the implications of considering a book as an interface and how e-books and e-readers remediate or simulate some of the physical book’s structures. To do this she briefly overviews the history of e-books and their affordances (e.g. digital hyperlinks), after first looking at talking or audio books, which undoubtedly constitute a very pertinent precedent. She then studies three approaches to digitalizing books: the Gutenberg Project, the Internet Archive, and Google Books. I particularly liked her description of the Internet Archive. Her descriptions, perhaps somewhat unavoidably, spill over from e-books to e-libraries, an interesting and important topic in its own right. She points out that:

Each of these three initiatives, Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Books, views its massive digitalization effort as a public good, but their approaches to the book itself differ in important ways. Project Gutenberg’s focus on ASCII renderings of public domain works aims to make the text as accessible and fluid as possible, ignoring its former materiality. This aligns it with Google, which also emphasizes text in the interest of indexing, searchability, and easy access […] the ultimate goal of Google’s book scanning initiative remains fattening its search engine. The Internet Archive has it both ways -it treats the book as an object, providing high-resolution color scans that show the nuances of the page’s surface and include foldout images and marginalia to replicate the book as closely as possible, but it also makes the same book available in multiple digital formats to meet the needs of different readers [...]

The chapter also looks a little more closely at why the author included the notion of publication as being central to the definition of a book and the role of ISBN and even the tendency in some quarters of forgoing ISBNs. The chapter overviews the development of books written to take advantage of the affordances of networked, screen-based devices (artist e-books?) such as Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizaro’s novella Pry (Tender Claws, 2014) exploring, among others, haptic modalities of reading:

The interactive experience they create invite us to interrogate, or at least consider, the ubiquitous devices that structure our daily lives but that we tend to treat as invisible.

Borsuk ends by revisiting her guiding idea:

[...A]rtists’ books provide a useful touchstone for thinking about digital books because they are fundamentally interactive, tactile, and multisensory: the reader must manipulate them to experience their full effect. These works draw attention to the book’s subversive and propagandistic potentials. They reflect on the circulation of such objects as well as their silencing […] By bringing its interface into focus, they draw attention to a deeper history of mutation and play with book form.

The author also includes a glossary and a recommended section Further Reading and Writing in addition to an extended bibliography.

Amaranth Borsuk has written a thought-provoking and intriguing book, which, as another Goodreads reviewer accurately points out, would be a valuable resource for an undergraduate or graduate course on the future of the book. In my view, it can also help those of us who are caught up in the polemics of paper-based books versus e-books, develop a richer, more balanced view of the topic.

[Gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I Love The Book

[Roger Whitson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A useful and concise but also provocative history of the book that would be great in either an undergrad or a graduate digital humanities course. Borsuk does a great job demystifying the history surrounding the book, showing the startling stories behind seemingly innocuous details. She also explores the rise of Google and social media as very different responses to the book as well as book artists whose visions suggest what the book might become.

[Alexis Kaelin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not your typical book history book. Heavy emphasis on book arts and artists books, which enhanced discussion of the philosophy of books and content vs. container. Some of the discussion about artists books was a little too much.

[Verónica Juárez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un interesante repaso histórico por el libro y sus múltiples formatos que nos hacen replantearnos qué es un libro. Tiene un énfasis importante en los libros de arte que me dejó una sensación de estar viendo un catálogo. La parte del libro electrónico y audiolibro a mi gusto se quedó corta.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Para los fanáticos de los libros, un imprescindible. La autora nos lleva por un recorrido pasado y futuro sobre la concepción del libro y sus potencialidades.

[Kerfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Some scholars consider this period of textual fixity and enclosure the Gutenberg parentheses...suggesting that we are returning to a culture that values orality and ephemerality, no longer needing ideas bound between covers or owned in quite the same way."

Is a piece of art that claims to be a book actually a book? Is a digital experience? Borsuk casts a wide net as she follows the history of the thing we call the book.

From the clay tablets of the Middle East to the Khipu of Peru, from papyrus scrolls to inscriptions on shells or bones, from silk documents to libraries, accordion books, woodblock prints, movable type and printing presses, from copyrights, photography and mass commercialization to digital and experimental forms of telling stories and holding information--the many transformations of what we have called a book is dizzying.

Borsuk prefers an open-ended definition, and her careful rendering of the different approaches to recording stories, poems, and information used by various peoples--always influenced by their cultures and environments--reinforces that view. The ideas she covers expand and illuminate what a book can be.

I myself am attached to the codex and its related material forms. Although very interested in artists' books, I often find them to be much more "art" than "book". Interactive digital experiences also seem less bookish than filmish to me. But her point about the ultimate ephemerality of all life, which includes human record-keeping and stories, and its contemporary reflection in the way we interact with those records and stories, feels true. It's all dust in the end. And the accumulations are endless.

If you are at all interested in books--and their past, present and future--"The Book" is an excellent place to visit.

[Colin Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m using this as a textbook for an LIS class, and I can strongly recommend this as a thorough and insightful yet highly readable introduction to the history of the book.

Borsuk covers the main points in the historical development of the book, especially focusing on the interrelationship of materiality and and concept of The Book. While it’s impossible to write an exhaustive history of a global information technology that’s been around for millennia, Borsuk impressively presents a holistic story in a couple hundred pages.

While Borsuk doesn’t go into much detail on any one figure or element of book history, she makes the subject both approachable to newcomers and compelling for book history nuts. She accomplishes this by subtly developing a bigger argument throughout the book: the tension of making the book into a ‘crystal goblet’ invisibly carrying information content v. making the book a material object with dynamic cultural significance. Borsuk highlights this tension as a constant throughout book history, including today with ebooks as the newest instance of the book as crystal goblet.

My only real complaint is that chapter 3, an extended case study on artist’s books, felt a little out of place. I’m huge fan of artist’s books and did appreciate Borsuk’s treatment of these and did understand why these make for good examples of Borsuk’s bigger point…but what could have been a brief aside turned into a quarter of the book. This space might have been better used discussing the growth of a fully literate society for instance.

[Moon Captain · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of fun stuff I never knew or really thought about before. My interest began to wane in part 3 talking about Duchamp and the 60s and funky artists and then part 4 where we got into all the digital crap really bummed me out. The internet archive is so amazing though. It's tough. I also was reminded reading this that libraries don't sell their discards anymore they just trash them which is insane to me. Personally I kinda hate libraries a lot because they censor and destroy information, but I've been traumatized in a lot of ways by libraries. Institutions suck! Go give the internet archive your money!!! They're the only good guys, as far as I know

[Reggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this for my History of the Book class. This takes a deep dive into the question "what is a book" and explores the idea, content, and interface with numerous examples. While it posed a lot of interesting questions and highlighted some things I might not have otherwise heard about, this was a little dense for me. A good read for those in Library Science fields, but I had hoped that this would have tied in with the course a bit more. Still, I like the formatting and style of this tome, so I'm glad I picked it up!

[H James · Rating 1 out of 5]

A half‐researched version of Keith Houston’s book of the same title. It brims with topics worthy of recounting but speaks in weasel words like “may have been the most” and “[so‐and‐so] suggested”.

[Iliiaz Akhmedov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading The Book is a must have fractal experience!

A recursive pattern on the cover is the ultimate invite to the meta read.

The Book says a book.. is a fluid artifact of stored knowledge sculpted over time :3 :3 :3

My biggest learning is the knowledge presentation. Some top of mind are the novel written with skipped 'e' letter on the disappearance of millions of Jews, the Spritz webapp pacing word appearance for fast reading, and unconventional aesthetic printing.

[Blake Gama · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. Never thought about books this way. I read it for a class, and, despite the fact I had to speed read it, it was a very enjoyable and informative reading. If you're intrigued but the history of books, and about what constitutes a book, and how these concepts have changed through history, it is worth reading this one.

[Abdul Alhazred · Rating 2 out of 5]

A somewhat good introduction to the history of the book followed by the remaining half talking about the concept of a book in art and waxing lyrical over conceptual artists, for example one who burned a book to make us realize books are fragile. If that makes you gasp with newfound insight maybe this book is for you.

[Antonio Gallo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ogni libro è un uomo, ogni uomo è un libro. Impossibile immaginare la Biblioteca dell'Universo. Dovrebbe contenere i libri di tutti i trapassati, i passati, i presenti ed i futuri. Nemmeno Babele potrebbe contenerli.

[Mia Varinia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un buen libro sobre cómo la idea del mismo ha cambiado con respecto a la tecnología y las necesidades de los lectores. Como el libro deja de ser solo algo físico y pasa a ser una experiencia completa cuando se modifica

[Juan Fernando · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesante

Es interesante el libro, en algunas partes se pierde un poco de lo que comienza a prefigurar y no cierra las ideas o estas ideas se diluyen un poco. De todas maneras es un buen compendio de referencias.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I did not enjoy my time with this book. To the credit of the author, this is a well written book. Unfortunately it was forced upon me by a graduate course and my reading of it was exclusively motivated by compliance.

[Cassie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been contemplating on the book as an object for a while now and this was a great primer with some further reading recommendations I'm hoping to check out. In 2025, some information feels a bit out of date, but super interesting stuff!

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book full of historical insights and interesting ideas about the art inherent in our reading media, e.g. books, e-readers, fully immersive constructs, etc.

[Wayne's · Rating 5 out of 5]

It starts as a basic history of the book and it is certainly that. However it develops into a serious introduction to function purpose and form. Well worth reading!!

[Tanya Gold · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Object, content, idea, and interface, the book changes us as we change it, letter by letter, page by page."
A fascinating history of the book, its function, and its form.

[chrisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating reading for anyone who loves books. Will definitely challenge your idea of what a book is and can be.

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

great resource and a fascinating read