After reading Borusk’s chapter three for this week’s reading, I found myself extremely intrigued on how they discussed the idea of “the book being just more than an object. The book as I’ve come to understand from this chapter is that books can manifest whatever idea it wants depending on the author and the fact that you’re able to encapsulate that idea into a “book” is what makes the book such a dangerous tool and more importantly, a vulnerable one, but not for the reasons one might have expected, like myself. “Susceptible to decay, their power to spread ideas makes them vulnerable to censorship, defacement, and destruction, particularly motivated by ideological and political difference”(Borsuk 179). We can see that the idea of how the book functions or rather what it is capable of encapsulating makes it a dangerous tool in the hands of the wrong person. The irony of how the chapter later describes how books can withstand harsh weather, hand oil from human hands, the numerous times of picking up, opening and closing then putting back on the shelf which wears it down, but cannot withstand how it can be used as a weapon for both politics and the capitalist market. The book is able to withstand so many different types of physical attacks yet its most vulnerable piece is its concept and not really its physical form.

Understanding how society uses the “idea” of a book is crucial to understanding why we use it as a tool or weapon for either power, monetary gain or to push an ideology as mentioned early. It also blows my mind reading this section and tying it in with last week’s and precious weeks class discussion where we talked about censorship in books and how it has essentially always existed. How trusted people were able to add footnotes, write in the margins and such where the information could be changed or altered made me really think about how they weaponized this tool for themselves. In fact, I am also now thinking about marginalia is also used as a tool because of its concept in which you can write within the text.

Overall, we must look past the content of the book and understand its ideological concept. It is not a vulnerable or dangerous tool because it HAS certain information or content, but rather because it is a vessel in which it can show ideas and concept in whatever way shape or form that the author wants for their audience.