In their introduction to this volume, Anthony Enns and Bernhard Metz seek to show how the material aspects of literary texts, such as the cover, binding, and typography, reflect or even determine their cultural status. Recent experimental research seems to confirm this hypothesis by showing that book covers play an important role in the first evaluation of a text. As the history of the literary field shows, the prestige of books is the product of the tension between two competing capitals: symbolic and economic capital. Their relation is inversely proportional, as symbolic capital increases the more economic capital decreases, and vice versa. When books are heavily promoted and consequently popular, for example, they are often perceived as trivial, whereas rare and complex books are more often perceived as serious and therefore prestigious. If, as the editors of the present volume seem to propose, the prestige of books changes depending on variations in book production, then the digital era should have a huge impact on this value.

The rise of the internet is only one aspect of the digital revolution—a technological transformation that has had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the publishing industry. The transformation that has affected the publishing industry at every level of the value chain is reflected by the growth of online retailers like Amazon as well as the much-publicized debates about digital books among literary critics. As Adriaan van der Weel puts it, thanks to digitality we are experiencing the third reading revolution of humanity, which is changing the “Order of the Book” that formed the basis of Western culture. Van der Weel uses Walter Benjamin's concept of “aura” to describe the authority of the print book and the loss of the “aura” to describe the fate of the book in the digital age. This loss is precisely a loss of prestige, which is directly linked to the materiality of books. The digital text threatens the existence of the print book in several ways. First of all, digital copies of a text cannot be distinguished from the original. Secondly, in a digital world, a literary text always runs the risk of “digital obsolescence” (i.e., the deterioration of its materiality).