The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination

Abstract

E-books are human artifacts and bear the traces of their making no less for being digital, though they bear those traces in ways bibliographers have yet to explain thoroughly. The bibliographic consideration of e-books is a dual challenge in that it must reckon not only with unfamiliar forms of textuality but also with a pervasive cultural discourse about e-books that tends to mystify the textual condition itself. This article explores the dual nature of that challenge and outlines some principles toward the bibliographical study of e-books, taking the Canadian novel The Sentimentalists (Gaspereau Press, 2009) as a test case.