ABSTRACT
It may have simply been the next logical step for book historians, especially those thinking about the sociology of texts in the 1990s and early 2000s, but the rise of e-books so strikingly correlates, chronologically, to a scholarly interest in readerly annotation practices that one is tempted to assert causation. In 1989, the year before Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton’s “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Project Gutenberg added its tenth book—The King James Bible—to its digital corpus. 1 The Sony Bookman appeared in 1992, as did Roger Chartier’s L’ordre des livres (1992). 2 In 1994, Lydia G. Cochrane’s English translation of that work, The Order of Books, was published, and Project Gutenberg added its 100th book (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare). In 1995 when William H. Sherman’s John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance appeared, Project Gutenberg was adding sixteen books per month; the next year that number doubled to thirty-two per month and David M. Bergeron’s essay collection Reading and Writing in Shakespeare was published. In 1998, the SoftBook Reader, the Rocket eBook Reader, and Adrian John’s The Nature of the Book were released. If my goal really were to argue for causation, I might go on tracking, year by year, the coincidental rise of e-readers and scholarly studies of Renaissance readers. Right in the midst of the timeline, just before a series of breakthrough devices such as Sony Reader (2006), Amazon Kindle (2007), Apple iPhone (2007), Barnes & Noble Nook (2009), and Apple iPad (2010), we would find Heidi Brayman’s Reading Material in Early Modern England (2005), a defining work in the history of early modern reading that shifted focus from professional scholars (such as Harvey and Dee) to “less extraordinary readers.” 3 In the opening sentence, Brayman reflects on the book historical context of her own work: “This book was written over a decade that brought electronic communication and literacy into the offices and homes of a great variety of readers.” 4 She goes on to suggest that the “proliferation of electronic media and its displacement of print have prompted a range of questions” such as “What practices does the codex 16encourage and allow?” “What should be preserved of this medium?” and “What might an electronic book look like?” From Brayman’s first sentence, we begin to learn about a period of new and exciting variety of readers of all kinds of printed books, and we learn all this in a study that was conceived during a period of new and exciting variety of readers of all kinds of e-books.
