Darnton's thoughts are provocative, but his assemblage of essays, reviews and scholarly articles, many previously published in the New York Review of Books, doesn't quite measure up to the task. Some of the material is very recent, some was first published in the 1980s. As Darnton confesses, these pieces were "fired off, scattershot". The same concerns emerge over and over, with an insistence that comes to seem obsessive. In the final part of the book, essays on subjects such as the history of the commonplace book or the complex origins of Shakespearean bibliography unexpectedly appear. They are intriguing and accomplished, but the investigation of such matters is unlikely to interest readers eager to learn about the pressing consequences of Google's imperialism or the changing prospects for e-texts. Darnton is not clear about who should read this book and why. The result is a muddle.