ROGER CHARTIER  What is a book? The question is not new. Kant asked it explicitly in 1797, in his Metaphysical Principles of the Doctrine of Right. The first reason for asking it was his involvement in the debate on literary property rights and the pirating of books, which had then started in Germany. This discussion, which involved philosophers, poets and publishers, had to do with the specific characteristics of publishing in the Holy Roman Empire. The political fragmentation of the empire imposed severe limitations on the privileges of publishers, which were only lawful within a given, often very small, territory. Consequently, the reproduction of works outside the sovereign territory that granted the privilege was widespread and, although it was regarded as legitimate by publishers and booksellers located in other states, it was considered intellectually illegitimate by the authors and original publishers, who felt they had been unfairly despoiled of their rights. But there is another reason why Kant asked this question, which has nothing to do with any specific circumstances. As a ‘material product’, a book is the object of a property right, defined as a right over something authorising its private use, shared by all those who are in possession of the same thing – for example, the purchasers of the different copies of a publication. But a book is also a discourse and therefore the object of an individual right that justifies sole and exclusive ownership. It is, simultaneously, a material-artefact of which the purchaser becomes the legitimate owner and a discourse owned by its author, ‘notwithstanding reproduction’, as Kant wrote. In this second sense, a book is understood as a work that transcends all its possible materialisations. The Kantian association between ‘opus mechanicum’ and ‘discourse’, which underpins the notion of literary property, gives a laicised form to the old metaphor which, in comparing a book to a human being, attributed to it a body and soul which are inseparably linked. This association between the object and the discourse was maintained by all the successive forms which books have taken: Sumerian tablets, ancient Greek and Latin parchments, manuscript codices, printed books. With ancient parchments, a single work was divided into several books; with the codex, manuscript or printed book, a single book could contain several works.

The radically original feature of the digital world was that it wrought a drastic separation between the medium and the discourse. The screen is the medium for all the texts that its user summons up or produces. It is in no way linked to a particular discourse, as happens with books. An ‘ebook’ is not truly a book, insofar as the identity of its discourse is no longer materialised by the object that contains and transmits it. In the world of digital textuality, discourses are no longer inscribed on objects that enable us to recognise their specific identity. The digital world is a world of decontextualised fragments, juxtaposed and able to be recomposed ad infinitum, without it being necessary or desirable to understand their relationship with the book from which they were taken.

RC  By breaking the ancient connection between the text and the object on which it is inscribed, between discourses and their actual materialities, the digital world forces us to make a radical reassessment of the gestures and notions we associate with writing. We should not underestimate the originality of the age in which we find ourselves. The different transformations of written culture, which in the past were always separate, present themselves simultaneously in the digital universe. The revolution of electronic communication is at the same time a revolution in the technique of producing and reproducing texts, a revolution in materiality and the form of medium and a revolution in reading practices. A new ecology of writing has been established, characterised by several breaks with the past. The first is the use of the same medium for reading and writing. In the pre-digital world, the objects intended for the reading of printed texts (books, magazines or newspapers) and the objects to which people committed their personal writings (sheets of paper, notebooks, letters) were separate. In the electronic world, the two practices of the new wreaders – readers who write, and writers who read – are closely conjoined on the same screen. A second characteristic of the digital world establishes the morphological continuity between different categories of discourse: social media messages, information on websites, books or electronic articles. The notion of difference arising from their actual materiality has vanished. This continuity eliminates the traditional procedures of reading, which assumed both immediate comprehension – thanks to the form of the publication, the type of knowledge or pleasure that the reader may expect from a text – and also perception of the works as endowed with their own identity, totality and coherence. Hence, a third characteristic. Fragments of text appear on the luminous surface of the screen without our being able to see immediately the limits and the coherence of the text or of the corpus (book, copy of a magazine or other publication) from which they are taken. With the discontinuous, segmented reading of digital texts, we have moved from autonomy to fragments, transformed into decontextualised textual units. The truth is that it is not the digital screen that has prompted us to fragment works. This was already demanded both by a typological reading of the Bible, comparing parts of the Gospels with their foreshadowings in the Old Testament, and by the Humanist intellectual technique of commonplaces, which required people to extract and copy quotations from books they had read, so as to form a repertoire of reusable formulae. However, we should not be misled by this morphological similarity. The fragmentation of texts has a different meaning depending on whether it is accompanied by perception of the entire text contained in the written object, as offered by the materiality of the codex, or whether the visible link between the fragment and the whole to which it belongs is undone. In the digital world, it is the actual notion of fragment that becomes problematic, as it always presupposes the perception of a whole, either present or vanished. There is no equivalent in the past to the rupture effected by the digital ecology of writing. The invention of printing in the fifteenth century was a fundamental technical revolution, but it did not transform the structure of the book, which, since the early centuries of the Christian era, had comprised the codex organised in signatures, sheets and pages, all bound together. The appearance and dissemination of the codex from the second to the fourth centuries A.D. was a fundamental morphological revolution, and replaced the parchments of the Ancients with a new book form, but without transforming the technique for reproducing texts which, until Gutenberg, was exclusively that of hand copying. The various revolutions in reading occurred in periods of stability either of the morphology of the codex (such as in the case of the generalisation of silent reading), or else of printing technique (such as in the case of the reading revolution of the eighteenth century or the democratisation of reading, made possible by wider literacy as a result of schooling, and by publishing strategies in the nineteenth century). The simultaneity of the technical, morphological and cultural changes that have characterised the digital revolution is an unprecedented phenomenon.

RC  In the early modern age, your question connects to the ‘reading revolution’ of the eighteenth century. Numerous texts from that century (travelogues, descriptions of cities, memoirs) refer insistently to the new universality of reading, found in every social milieu, in every circumstance of life, everywhere in the quotidian. According to these, a real ‘mania for reading’, transformed into a ‘reading fever’ or ‘reading fury’ (German texts speak of Lesesucht, Lesefieber or Lesewut), had taken hold of the population. Philosophical discourse also took a dim view of too much reading. Reading as a pastime was stigmatised as a true ‘narcotic’, the word used by Fichte. On the one hand, the imaginary world proposed by artists (in paintings, drawings and engravings) caused representations of reading to proliferate in paintings and engravings, in decorative faïence and porcelain, on canvases and pocket watches, in the form of silhouettes and figurines. This imaginary world points to new readers – women, children, artisans, peasants – and new habits, such as reading in the open air, in the garden or countryside, people reading while they walked, reading in bed, which prepares or takes the place of erotic encounters, reading to an auditorium, in the sociability of the salon or family get-togethers. Each in its own way, these representations show that practices have changed, that readers are more numerous, and fanatical or passionate about reading. Should we translate these perceptions using the set of notions constructed by Rolf Engelsing, who contrasts traditional reading, that he calls ‘intensive’, with modern reading, described as ‘extensive’? According to this dichotomy, the ‘intensive’ reader was confronted with a limited and closed corpus of texts, read and re-read, memorised and recited, understood and known by heart, handed down from generation to generation. The ‘extensive’ reader is entirely different: he or she consumes large quantities of new and ephemeral printed matter, reading it quickly and avidly, and approaching it with a distanced and critical eye.

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