This chapter uses book history and digital humanities approaches to situate e-books’ liminal ‘book but not real book’ status in historic and contemporary contexts. The question of whether digital books deserve full status as ‘books’ – and equality with print – has dogged e-books since their inception. Readers are now negotiating e-book realness on their own terms. Addressing definitions of bookness and long-standing debates on digital materiality, the chapter progresses through aspects of legitimacy to analysis of qualitative data on whether, and why, readers consider e-books real. The complexity of readers’ conceptions of the realness of e-books demonstrates how strands of the metaphor of the book, the bookness of physical books, the realness of electronic texts, and the particularities of paratext and literary status for digital works interweave, setting the stage for subsequent chapters following the reader through stages of discovering, obtaining, reading, retaining, displaying, and (sometimes) loving a digital book.

Today three forces threaten to limit speech. The first pits guns against words, creating a showdown between the Second Amendment and the First. The second sees powerful speakers invoking their right to speak in order to silence other people’s speech. Third, and perhaps the most subtle, the monitoring of our digital speech by government and business chills our ability to say what we want online. Free speech will survive provided we remain vigilant in defending the speech rights of the minority against what has been called the tyranny of the majority.