Johanna Drucker brings up a lot in the piece titled ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-Space’ and one of the main ones was the design of the e-book in its form as compared to the traditional book. Drucker brings up a lot of terminology throughout the piece. The ones in particular that are attributed to e-book are “drawbacks” “interactive” “metaphors” and even “book”. Starting with drawbacks we can identify many depending on our preference of reading style. As a person who prefers the literal book I look at the e-book as limiting in it’s ability to satisfy me as a reader and keep me interested. After reading the piece I can understand the many benefits of an e-book but still wonder about the future relationship of these two means of reading.

Drucker also brings up the idea of the program. When my discussion group brought up this idea we realized the many connections, as subtle and obvious as they were, production and in particular play production. Like a play, a piece of writing is scene through many different eyes and each production is not exactly the same as the previous one. It may be the same story, and on some cases the same faces and stage, but it is never exactly the same as the previous person experience. It is put on display in different ways. Books can be read in different locations and depending on the location, the format, the reader it has a different meaning.

A third main point that Drucker brought up involved the phenomenon that surrounds the codex. She points out that “information… gains its value through social use, not through inherent or abstract properties.” (p11) meaning that the contents of a book, virtual or physical, gains value the more stories are shared, spread around, discussed, and more.

E-space was something that confused me from the beginning. In our discussion hosting group meeting we tried to Google e-space but rather discovered that the definition could be hidden in the text. We believe that we uncovered the idea that e-space is the realm in which we are free to interpret activity

The other thing that tripped me up was the connection of books to paintings. I can understand the connection of plays and art in a broad form but the idea of a still object is different. The “assertion that a book is never “self-identical” is true but asserting the image of many books or many pages makes it only slightly more acceptable in the fit on the text as I continued to read.

After reading Johanna Drucker’s piece on “The Virtual Codex from Space to E-space” I started to wonder about the continuation of the growing product to books and e-books. Can we claim, due to the differences we now understand of the two products, one of the products will not fully take over for the other or die out? If the e-book has so many benefits over the bound book, why are we still printing and using these bounded objects?