"What We Got Wrong about Books"

Joseph Esposito has published "What We Got Wrong about Books" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

This is where we have gotten into trouble. The apparent fixity of a book, the tendency to think of a book as something stuck inside an inflexible container, has led us to imagine that books are used the way they are written, or how we assume they are written—that is, from beginning to end. The prominence of the novel as a literary form over the past two centuries reinforces this. Who would want to break off in the middle of Tom Jones? The traditional novel is linear, which has created an expectation that all books are linear. That expectation is simply wrong, as Kobo and our own reading experience tell us.

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Author: Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr.