This chapter examines e-book realness in terms of identity and love: e-books shared or not shared, displayed or not displayed, and made a cherished part of the reader’s personal history or barred from such status. It examines aspects of display and cultural capital in forms specific to digital and forms specific to print. It investigates how stereotypes (of some readers as unqualified and some reading practices as inferior) and assumptions (including tropes of furtive reading) interact with existing narratives of literary decline, technology as a threat to culture, and women as incompetent readers. It explores love for reading devices as well as love for print, and how identity as a bibliophile proves compatible with e-reading. E-books are only sometimes real, but it is their very flexibility that makes them so valuable to book lovers. They can be public or private, permanent or ephemeral, valuable or valueless, intimate or distant, depending on one’s usage and settings but also on one’s idea of what an e-book is; and, as demonstrated, that idea is highly adaptable and at least sometimes under one’s conscious control.

This chapter investigates first encounters with e-books and the processes by which readers evaluate a given work. Drawing on Genette’s theories of paratext and Drucker’s of performative materiality, it examines how trust is established and legitimacy constituted in practice, considering realness and bookness in terms of a given e-book’s status as cultural product and cultural object, and the ways in which e-book legitimacy can hinge on relationship to a print edition or to traditional mainstream publishing. It analyses readers’ rationale of realness on the theme of equivalence, contrasting conceptions of an e-book as real because ‘bits and ink – there’s no difference’ and unreal because they are ‘not the same product’. Finally, it considers the digital proxy and the ersatz book as two discrete types of e-book unrealness.