Ivan Illich, in his brilliant study of medieval reading and the evolution of the book, In the Vineyard of the Text, noted how emerging textual technologies reconfigured how readers related to what they read. It is a complex, multifaceted argument and I won’t do justice to it here, but the heart of it is summed up in the title of Illich’s closing chapter, “From Book to Text.” After explaining what Illich meant by the that formulation, I’m going to suggest that we consider an analogous development: from photograph to image. Like the photography, writing is, as Plato understood, a mnemonic technology. The book or codex is only one form the technology has taken, but it is arguably the most important form owing to its storage capacity and portability. Contrast the book to, for instance, a carved stone tablet or a scroll and you’ll immediately recognize the brilliance of the design. But the matter of sorting and searching remained a significant problem until the twelfth century. It is then that new features appeared to improve the book’s accessibility and user-friendliness, among them chapter titles, pagination, and the alphabetized index. Now one cloud access particular passages without having to either read the whole work or, more to the point, either memorize the passages or their location in the book (illuminated manuscripts were designed to aide with the latter).
Ivan Illich在他对中世纪阅读和书的演变的杰出研究中，在《In the Vineyard of the Text》中指出，新兴的文本技术是如何重新配置读者与他们所读的东西的关系的。这是一个复杂的、多方面的论点，它的核心被总结在Illich最后一章的标题中，"从书到文本"（From Book to Text）。在解释了Illich的这一表述的含义之后，建议我们考虑一个类似的发展：从照片到图像。
就像摄影一样，正如柏拉图所理解的，写作是一种记忆技术。书籍或手抄本只是这种技术的一种形式，但由于其存储能力和便携性，它可以说是最重要的形式。将书与雕刻的石板或卷轴等进行对比，你会立即认识到设计的精妙之处。但直到12世纪，分类和搜索的问题仍然是一个重要的问题。就在那时，出现了一些新的功能，以改善书的可及性和用户友好性，其中包括章节标题、分页和按字母顺序排列的索引。现在，人们无需阅读整部作品，或者，更重要的是，记住这些段落或它们在书中的位置，就可以访问特定的段落。