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The article discusses the materiality of electronic books (e-books). The author argues that e-books must be analyzed through the forensic frameworks of bibliography and textual scholarship and the non-empirical framework of performance theory. He focuses on the contentious publication of the book "The Sentimentalists," by Johanna Skibsrud, and its relations to the materiality of text. The author questions whether readers of the electronic version actually engage with same novel as those who read the traditional print version.

Why should designers of digital reading environments study the history of the book? What can the continuities and discontinuities—the successes and failures—of new developments in the book's long history teach us about its possible futures! Questions such as these often go unasked in commercial e-book design and other domains that emphasize technical innovation as their only criterion for evaluating the past. However, new reading environments challenge us to understand the role of material forms in meaning-making, and to situate e-books and digital reading devices within the changing history of books and reading. This article explores that rationale as embodied by the Architectures of the Book (ArchBook) project, an online, open-access, and peer-reviewed collection of richly illustrated essays about specific design features in the history of the book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]