Virgil

Inferno, Dan Brown's new book about Dante, is coming out on May 14, 2013 from Doubleday in the U.S., and Transworld Publishers in the UK (a division of Random House).

Brown announced that he was writing something new in May 2012. Though Brown had been cryptic about the topic of the book, he has now revealed more information.

The book will again feature The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and The Lost Symbol's lead character Robert Langdon.

There's an excerpt from Andrew Piper's "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times" on Slate that trumpets the tactile advantages of p-books, positing that "E-reading isn't reading." 

Quoth Piper: "For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure."

Aristotle, Braille, Delacroix and our favorite, El Lissitzky, also pop in.

—Brian Howard