This final chapter of Amaranth Borsuk’s The Book discusses digital archiving initiatives such as The Internet Archive, Project Gutenburg, and Google Books. Crating digital texts still requires a hands on physical practice. The Internet Archive emphasizes the book as object by providing high resolution images of the pages in addition to web accessible files. These files and images fo not appear on the internet through digital means alone. They first require a physical process with a ” camera and cradle setup….while previous methods involved slicing off a book’s binding to facilitate auto feed of its pages though a scanner” (218).

The physicality of creating digital texts is also seen in the work of Andrew Norman Wilson, in Workers Leaving the GooglePlex and beyond: “[Wilson] has published images found among Google’s books that include the hands or fingers of these invisible scanners—a reminder of the relationship between the manual and the digital” (226). This relationship, as Borsuk implies, seems to be a imbalanced one, as the employees tasked with this scanning work (archival work) were mostly people of color who didn’t receive the same benefits as other employees. In this context, at least, we can see that the materiality of the book, and the labor involved in interacting with the object, is deemphasized and undervalued.

Maybe this is due in part to who digital archiving benefits the most: the underprivileged and under-resourced who “lack access to brick and mortar libraries (220). The relative accessibility of digital texts is threatening to publishers and those who profit off the commodification of the book. It seems that the further accessibility of digital texts tends to be hindered by the intervening of publishers. While I feel like I do buy into the perceived value of authorship (I feel like I would never pursue publishing if I didn’t) the publishing industry and copyright laws withhold text from the public in the name of capital.