</p><p>Most people I know prefer to read off paper. The arguments for the printed text usually are about exhaustion, e.g. “I get tired reading from a screen”, lack of retention, e.g. “It’s proven that people remember things they read on paper better than on screen”, and in the circles I tend to run in, a sentimentality pervades, nostalgic for the haptic experience that reading from printed books brings.
</p><p>We expect acceleration from digital technologies. The cultural significance of new media is bolstered through remediality, which is its refashioning through the lens of old media<supclass="reference"id="cite_ref-1"><ahref="#cite_note-1">[1]</a></sup>. Skeuomorphic design brings us the texture of paper on a screen. Hayles argues for intermediality, the interpretations between, and the coexistence of all media, including printed and digital texts.<supclass="reference"id="cite_ref-2"><ahref="#cite_note-2">[2]</a></sup>
</p><p>Digital text is fraught with trauma, underpinned by the possibility of fragmentation. Text that is to the reader fully searchable and copy-pasteable is also text that threatens to come apart. Text that is less of an object, and more a process, often not residing in any one place in a computer file system, assembled dynamically, “on-the-fly”. Printed text, by contrast, reassures us by way of its indelibility.
</p><p>Image: The physical bootleg library contained in a disused champagne crate, and the digital bootleg library running from a Raspberry Pi computer
<liid="cite_note-1"><spanclass="mw-cite-backlink"><ahref="#cite_ref-1">↑</a></span><spanclass="reference-text">Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2003) <i>Remediation: understanding new media</i>. 6. Nachdr. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.</span>
</li>
<liid="cite_note-2"><spanclass="mw-cite-backlink"><ahref="#cite_ref-2">↑</a></span><spanclass="reference-text">Hayles, N.K. (2005) <i>My mother was a computer: digital subjects and literary texts</i>. Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press.</span>
