E-Readers and Polytextual Critique: On Some Emerging Material Conditions in the Early Age of Digital Reading

Abstract

Examining the emerging technology of e-readers in current usage, Stephan Packard argues that their mediality has consumers relate to the new cultural and material shape of the book: an object that only partially conforms with general tendencies among ‘new’, ‘digital’ media. Summarizing cultural and material perspectives through polytextuality, Packard interrogates the shifting rules of usage with respect to the knowledge those rules contain. His stance underscores a critical purpose. It sets apart an appraisal of e-readers’ current, probably transient role, as cultural objects, from a much grander, but unrealized earlier promise, discussed in the 1990s, that saw digital reading as a fulfilment of critical tendencies and affordances as continued from traditional reading and writing.