Colin,

Excellent post. I agree with those who’ve suggested to you that Sloan’s book is an excellent read for Digital Humanities scholars and students. I just wanted to add to your list of arguments for this text as a DH novel. What resonated most with me, as a Computers and Writing scholar, was the proliferation of digital technologies into the reading process. The use of metadata to crack the “code,” for instance. But I also loved how Sloan used some of the tropes of an old and secret society to demonstrate that various technologies have always been part of our reading processes. Sloan’s uses of bookmaking, translation, transcription, scanning, cataloguing, and encoding to foreground the long histories of various reading technologies. I guess what I’m getting at is how well I think the novel historicizes some of these practices, many of which are assumed to be the products/by-products of digital technologies. I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that Katt’s understanding of Google’s relationship to books, scanning, and translation is a-historical. But she doesn’t offer much in the way of historical context for these practices (Darnton’s a great read on this subject). I think that’s really her dramatic flaw that causes her so much confusion at the end of her project (sorry, trying to avoid spoilers). … Anyway, I just wanted to send along a thanks for posting about this book. It’s good to know others are enjoying it, too.