"For most of us today, the printed book remains the embodiment of text."

Yes and no--when I think "text," I emphatically do not automatically think "book." Maybe it's one of the perils of graduate school, but my definition of "text" has at some point over the last six years expanded to encompass just about any work that can communicate meaning--print, image, sound, graffiti, what-have-you. (I'm not sure that I would at this point honestly consider a sculpture a text, though I admit that might just be dimension-bias.) In my mind, I can create "texts" myself--books, not so much. Important distinction, that. But there's the problem--while books are not (for me, at least) the "embodiment of text," they are still something "more than," something somehow bigger, better, less attainable, (more permanent?) than the texts that I compose, even those that are published. Despite the fact that digital/multimedia texts can potentially carry meaning far more effectively and efficiently than printed books, those books and their clunky, static wood-pulp pages carry a cultural weight that their multimedia counterparts can only dream of.

Note: For what it's worth, as I was composing this post at my home computer, surrounded by my ever-growing collection of reference books--including three hefty dictionaries and both the Concise and the Unabridged editions of the Columbia Encyclopedia, all within arm's reach--I twice turned to dictionary.com for word definitions. I can't decide whether to be amused or depressed by that...