Contemporary reading practices shift and change in response to new contexts of digital delivery. Yet printed books persist as adaptable artifacts in a supposedly post-print, digitally ubiquitous technoculture. This persistence represents a notable trend toward physical materiality in cultural and even customer preference that would seem to disprove theories of digital takeover. This panel takes up the complications of this material turn to examine different aspects of contemporary book materiality in a digital age.

One hallmark of bestselling books is dialog in ordinary language. In her paper “Mobile Speech in Young Adult Novels: Markers of a Bestseller?,” Kathi Inman Berens asks: for Young Adult [YA] audiences whose ordinary speech transpires extensively through mobile computing, are printed books more likely to sell if their interior design features emojis, text messages, and social media attributes such as photo filters? Interrogating what makes a commercially successful YA book, Berens looks at Goodreads & Amazon reviews, and collates that data against Nielsen Bookscan sales numbers with the goal to isolate graphical interior design features that shift what, and how, young adults read. Using lessons derived in The Bestseller Code, a popular press book by digital humanist Matthew Jockers (a literary macroanalytics expert) and Jodie Archer, a literary agent, Berens discloses how book materiality in YA novels is a harbinger of new trends in book materiality in contemporary literature.

Books in themselves can also constitute material merchandise. In her paper "Merch Ado About Books: Materiality is the Soul of 'It' Factor," Emily F. Brooks argues that the authenticity of the materiality of in-universe tie-in books from some of the largest media franchises, Disney and the Wizarding World, enhances the value for fans. In particular, the collector’s editions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter tie-in The Tales of Beedle the Bard and Alex Hirsch and Rob Renzetti’s Journal 3 as extension of animated series Gravity Falls emphasize and replicate the tactile experience that the characters have with the books: whether through the intimacy of handwriting in a small leather-bound book or through the interactivity of solving cryptograms and revealing blacklight messages. Brooks applies Walter Benjamin’s concept of the aura to answer why fans are willing to spend quite a bit of money on collector’s editions when the text is available at much more affordable options.

Finally, the material specter of the book haunts other forms of consumer media as well. In his paper "Novel Media: Bookish Iterations Between Print and Digital," Caleb Andrew Milligan explores the relationship between the novel and new media in what he calls “novel” media. Cultural anxieties abound that the material importance of the book is diminishing in the face of digital ubiquity. Through novel media, Milligan analyzes the current state of literary reading caught between theories and market realities. Taking up publishing and content strategy company Visual Editions as case study, Milligan contrasts the persistence of book materiality--represented in Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut book Tree of Codes--with the perceived threat of digital abstraction--represented in Kate Pullinger’s mobile smartphone “book” Breathe. Visual Editions published both titles and seems situated at the nexus between the fetishization of what Jessica Pressman calls “bookishness” and the paradoxical desire for digital delivery methods that drive that bookish fetish in the first place. Milligan contributes novel media as a way of understanding current publishing trends in a digital age that longs for the book as it seems to “need” it less and less.