Chapter 1 reconstructs the contexts of mass digitisation and the Kantian copyright debate in which Kant’s 1785 essay is to be reread. First, I consider the Google Books project as an emblematic case for our urgent need to rethink authorship, copyright and their profound co-evolution with media technologies. Then, I review the recent debate surrounding the utilitarian-proprietary approach to copyright and its limits as suggested by three readers of Kant’s 1785 essay. After that, I propose an alternative media-theoretical way of looking at a printed book, one that focuses on the paratexts of Kant’s 1785 essay to illuminate the medial dimension of literary production and the limits of proprietary authorship. My contention is that although the three Kantian copyright scholars have demonstrated the power of Kant’s essay and its concept of the book as communicative act to reshape our understanding of authorship and copyright, they have also underestimated the material dimension of the text that affords the production of its meaning. A more adequate understanding of Kant’s text and how it could illuminate the present digital transformation of authorship and copyright would require that we attend closely to its medial-materialities.

Media historians speak of three “medium shifts” in the history of literature: from orality to writing, from writing to print, and from print to digital. This chapter investigates the history and the significance of the most recent shift, while questioning the notion of an absolute “rupture” with orality, manuscript, and print, all of which remain vital parts of the global literary ecosystem. Drawing on Benjamin Peters’s tripartite approach to the digital in terms of pointing, counting, and manipulating, Foxman argues that the developments in the digital representation of texts have continued to challenge divisions long held to be immutable – not least, those separating content, author, and reading. As we arrive in the digital present, Foxman argues, we are left questioning all our traditional beliefs about what text is.