>Not just a bag of words, but a thing held by human hands.
That makes sense, if one looks back on books. But if what if one looks forward? What is a book within a new paradigm, a book which is not a "unique string of words"?
What if, freed from sequential writing and reading, a book becomes a pathway of discovery, for both the writer and the reader?
>In the Kindle era, it seems pretty obvious. There is an implicit argument in the act of digitizing a book and removing it from the shelf: a book is its text. A book is a unique string of words, as good as its bits.
A book is a unique string of words.
The author illuminates the efforts to go back an study the book as a physical object - allowing that these objects often contain hints of previous readers. Hints of there stories.
A book, then is
I stumbled on recently an article in the Atlantic entitled "What is a Book? 
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In this electronic age, the meaning of books has, obviously, changed. For many, a book is no longer a physical object made from paper - it has also been digitized to be read on an electronic device.
In this sense, a book has become else: