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Paul Eggert's The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies offers an important perspective on the value of the work-concept in textual scholarship. This response to his book, written for a seminar at the 2021 Society for Textual Scholarship conference, takes up threads leading outward from his argument, and in three sections considers the potential of bibliography beyond books, textual scholarship beyond editing, and archives beyond metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.