This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”