This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.

The most-cited progenitors of manga (and, in part, anime) are medieval picture scrolls (emaki), Hokusai Manga, and 18th-century graphic fiction called kibyōshi. This chapter revisits them from the perspective of modern story-manga. It analyzes textual and material affordances of a manga-typical reading experience, stretching from devices of visual storytelling to publication formats and participatory culture. The emphasis is on demonstrating that correlations of today’s manga with aesthetic traditions may be highly instructive depending on how they are performed, in particular, on which type of manga is compared to which art form from the past against which set of contemporary concerns. As part of this endeavor, the historical contingency of “manga” comes to the fore: as visual art based on line drawing, but also as visual narrative realized through sequenced images and facilitated by transdiegetic devices; as fiction but also non-fiction narratives and non-narrative manuals; as not necessarily “cinematic” but also “theatrical” graphic narratives; and as defined by textual properties but also (sub)cultural practices of use.