Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book explains the various forms of physical mediums that writing has taken up over time. In it, there is an inherent questioning of the literal definition of a book (Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines it as “A portable volume consisting of a series of written, printed, or illustrated pages bound together for ease of reading”). Understanding the etymology of books brings its’ existence as a concrete concept into question in the same way that all of language is. For there to be an “objective” definition of what a book is would mean that there would need to be some sort of objective truth in the first place. Tracing the etymology of anything unveils that it is the result of hundreds, often thousands, of years of human experiences.

Because what a book physically is has changed so much over time (paper, papyrus, wood, or bamboo; written horizontally or vertically; read as we read it today or “like a laptop” (43)), the cultural experience of reading a book must have changed too. In the past, for example, being a scribe was a miserable experience, “they spent six hours a day hunched before the page in a cold scriptorium, incurring back-aches, headaches, eye strain, and cramps…” (48). Today, anyone who would create a hand-written book would do it as an artisanal craft and presumably out of passion. What would be required of a book-maker is completely different today versus thousands of years ago. What I want to emphasize is that this creates a completely different experience with the book thus changing the relationship and context surrounding books and the book reading experience.

Books seem to have a cultural resurgence among Gen Z as entertainment–I feel that books lost this for a few decades when TV and video games ruled as modes of storytelling. I wonder if the accessibility of books today has something to do with their modern association as a leisure activity. It is now easier than ever to read any book that you can imagine, dozens of different tablets exist for this activity. Additionally, hundreds of websites exist that post various modes of literature that would have previously been in book form. It is perhaps this unprecedented ease of access that causes phenomena like “booktok” which specializes in leisurely and captivating reading.