This chapter explores how readers who have chosen an e-book decide on their next step, contrasting the motivations for purchase (or conditional use license purchase), loan, and piracy. It draws on legal scholarship, book history, and fan studies to investigate how bookness and realness in the form of meaningful ownership can be constituted if desired, acknowledging that bookness and realness may be unwanted when readers prefer temporary, unauthorised, or unambiguously illegal uses. This recasts e-books as an integral part of building a personal library: sometimes as components, but sometimes just as tools. It concludes with evolving understanding of the rights of the reader and the fraught question of e-book control, and readers’ experiences of conflict with corporate entities over ownership of their collections. This further demonstrates how readers are able to move flexibly between conceptions of e-books as real books, ersatz books, and digital proxies.

This chapter examines e-book realness in terms of identity and love: e-books shared or not shared, displayed or not displayed, and made a cherished part of the reader’s personal history or barred from such status. It examines aspects of display and cultural capital in forms specific to digital and forms specific to print. It investigates how stereotypes (of some readers as unqualified and some reading practices as inferior) and assumptions (including tropes of furtive reading) interact with existing narratives of literary decline, technology as a threat to culture, and women as incompetent readers. It explores love for reading devices as well as love for print, and how identity as a bibliophile proves compatible with e-reading. E-books are only sometimes real, but it is their very flexibility that makes them so valuable to book lovers. They can be public or private, permanent or ephemeral, valuable or valueless, intimate or distant, depending on one’s usage and settings but also on one’s idea of what an e-book is; and, as demonstrated, that idea is highly adaptable and at least sometimes under one’s conscious control.

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.