I was recently reading in my educational psychology book for class when i came across this quote: “In early research, psychologists assumed that people create concepts based on rules about defining attributes, or distinctive features. For example, books all contain pages that are bound together in some way” (Woolfolk 299). This got me thinking about eBooks; surely there is no binding of those. However, going back to our last book viewing, not all of those works we saw were bound either. Perhaps in this case, binding is meant in a less literal sense. As books can be bound by story line, content, characters, and or style, as opposed to only being bound physically. But again it is still up for interpretation.
That is an interesting quote because the first part discusses attributes so binding could mean bound by the content. With eBooks I feel like that is the main way to interpret it but eBooks are literally bound in a different way. The quote does make you think about the intended interpretation.
With how the quote is phrased, the concept of a “book” (or more specifically a codex, which is what they seem to be implying) is “multiple pages bound together.” That is why it is not a scroll, but a codex. The same could be directed to eBooks. Rather than a “book” (codex), it has a different conceptual identity: an “eBook” (or rather, an electronic codex. It has separate and finite pages which must be changed in order to proceed). In the end, rather than a metaphorical “binding,” it is possible to view it as a plainly literal binding.