This chapter explores the actual reading event. It considers what kinds of pleasure readers seek from book reading and rereading (in different settings and at different times), and the ways in which an e-book does or does not deliver such satisfactions. Examining aspects such as tactile dimensions of embodied reading, the role of the material object, convenience and access, optimisation and customisation, and narrative immersion, it contextualises original findings with recent empirical research on screen reading and offers insights on how, where, and when intimacy, sense of achievement, and the feeling of being ‘lost in a book’ can be found in e-reading. Pleasures such as immersion and sense of achievement appear to be impeded by digital for some readers but facilitated for others. The chapter further examines how an e-book can be framed as an incomplete book (frequently as ‘content’ or ‘story’ and hence the ‘most important part’) without losing its power to satisfy.

This chapter investigates first encounters with e-books and the processes by which readers evaluate a given work. Drawing on Genette’s theories of paratext and Drucker’s of performative materiality, it examines how trust is established and legitimacy constituted in practice, considering realness and bookness in terms of a given e-book’s status as cultural product and cultural object, and the ways in which e-book legitimacy can hinge on relationship to a print edition or to traditional mainstream publishing. It analyses readers’ rationale of realness on the theme of equivalence, contrasting conceptions of an e-book as real because ‘bits and ink – there’s no difference’ and unreal because they are ‘not the same product’. Finally, it considers the digital proxy and the ersatz book as two discrete types of e-book unrealness.