Humanity has read, hoarded, discarded and demanded books for centuries; for centuries books have been intimately woven into our sense of ourselves, into the means by which we find out who we are and who we want to be. They have never been mere physical objects—paper pages of a certain size and weight printed with text and sometimes images, bound together on the left—never just cherished or reviled reminders of school-day torments, or mementos treasured as expressions of bourgeois achievement, or icons of aristocratic culture. They have been all these things and more. They have been instruments of enlightenment. No wonder, then, that the book business, although a very small part of the American economy, has attracted disproportionate attention. But does it still merit this attention? Do books still have their power?
