Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 06 Dec 2024).

Bookness -- Paratexts and first impressions: taking a chance on an e-book -- Ownership and permanence: e-book transactions -- Materiality, convenience, and customization: e-books and the act of reading -- Reading lives and reading identities: genre, audience, and being a reader of e-books.

Open Access. Unrestricted online access star

On any given day, millions of people will read e-books. Yet many of us will do so while holding them apart from 'real books'. The fact that a book can be worthy - of our time, money, respect, even love - without being 'real' is a fascinating paradox of twenty-first century reading. Drawing on original data from a longitudinal study, Laura Dietz investigates how movement between conceptions of e-books as ersatz, digital proxy, and incomplete books serves readers in unexpected ways. The cultural value of e-books remains an area of intense debate in publishing studies. Exploring the legitimacy of e-books in terms of their 'realness' and 'bookness', Dietz enriches our understanding of what e-books are, while also opening up new ways of thinking about how we imagine, how we use, and what we want from books of every kind. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.