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Most of us, through our computers or our even our phones, have access to more books than we could ever read in one lifetime. That certainly wouldn't have been the case in, say, the middle ages, when books — assuming you belonged to the elite who could read them in the first place — were […] 16th Century Bookwheels, the E-Readers of the Renaissance,...

What is the future of the book? Will it retain more or less the same basic paper-between-covers form as it has since the days of the Gutenberg Bible? Will it go entirely digital, becoming readable only with compatible electronic devices? Or will we, in the comfort of our armchairs, read them on glass-screened microfilm projectors? […] The e-Book Imagined in 1935 is a post...

Image courtesy of the University at Leeds In the striking image above, you can see an early experiment in making books portable--a 17th century precursor, if you will, to the modern day Kindle. According to the library at the University of Leeds, this "Jacobean Travelling Library" dates back to 1617. That's when William Hakewill, an […] Discover the Jacobean Traveling Library: The 17th Century...