The paper book is not dead: it has become an aesthetic object

book by Maya Angelou hanging from a bag like a 95-dollar charm might seem like the perfect symbol of the contemporary transformation of the book. Or of its definitive commodification. This happens in the collaboration between Coach and Penguin Books, which have created a series of readable micro-books, bound in leather and designed to be attached to a bag using a metal carabiner. The first selection of titles — from Angelou to Jane Austen and Celeste Ng — sold out almost immediately.

They are the size of a smartphone, feature covers illustrated specifically by Coach, and come in bright colors. They are book-accessories, of course, but also the symptom of a broader transformation. In the 2018 essay The Book, Amaranth Borsuk wrote that the book would not become obsolete with the advent of digital reading platforms, but would find “new incarnations and new audiences,” continuing to respond to desires linked to its material dimension.

For years, the death of the book was narrated as an inevitable consequence of digital culture. Yet the opposite has also happened: precisely because text can now circulate anywhere, the printed book has acquired a new symbolic, aesthetic, and social value.

he collection is part of the “Explore Your Story” campaign, built on the idea that objects can become biographical extensions. And indeed, the recent return of charms, between runways and street style, already speaks to a widespread need to personalize what we wear. But what happens when the book itself becomes a charm? Coach presents this personal narrative as an alternative to the fragmentation of Instagram stories, a return to individual complexity. Paradoxical, considering how perfectly instagrammable the product is.

Seeing a book with a strong political value like Angelou’s hanging from a bag as if it were a Labubu can disturb purists. The author is reduced to an aesthetic mood, reading to an accessory activity. But dismissing everything as simple commodification would be too easy. The book has always been a social object as well, a sign of belonging. What has changed is the speed with which the fashion system absorbs this potential and returns it as a desirable product.

oach is not alone. From the embroidered book clutches by Olympia Le-Tan to the Adelphi books brought to the runway by Etro in 2022, up to Dior's Book Tote reinterpreted with literary covers like Les Fleurs du Mal in 2026, the book has become an object treated on par with a luxury accessory.

To understand how we got here, we need to observe the ambiguous relationship that links the book to screens today. On one hand, it promises distance from digital, concentration, an almost therapeutic experience; on the other, it continues to live precisely through images, feeds, and social platforms, photographed, exhibited, and posed. To withstand this new gaze, it has also evolved materially: many publishing houses have rethought paper, format, covers, and graphic direction, extending to fiction and non-fiction the care once reserved mainly for art books.

The book, in short, was not reborn against digital, but also thanks to digital. During the pandemic, the Zoom era had already brought attention back to domestic backgrounds. The bookshelves behind politicians, intellectuals, and celebrities suddenly became a cultural status symbol. The more life passed through screens, the more the book became a signal to be exhibited inside the frame.

Meanwhile, online, #BookTok and book influencers were transforming reading into a deeply visual practice, while memes and mood boards assigned caricatured identities to books: in some social bubbles, everyone knows that the “performative male” reads Joan Didion and the “pick-me girl” reads Bret Easton Ellis. 

Alessandro Ludovico, media theorist and author of *Post-Digital Print*.

Jessica Pressman has defined this set of practices that bring the book back into visual culture, in sentimental, fetishistic, or even radical ways, as bookishness. Social media made analog reading desirable, and fashion intercepted the trend. The profession of book stylist has allegedly even emerged, tasked with choosing the books with which to photograph celebrities, decorate sets, and build credible cultural atmospheres. 

Meanwhile, more and more luxury brands are linking themselves to the literary universe: from the Miu Miu Literary Club, inspired by the European tradition of literary salons, to the textual campaign The Narratives, with which Valentino invited female and male writers to lend their words. Whether it is marketing or not, the exchange remains authentic: the book confers symbolic depth to the brand, while the brand offers new stages to the book.

A recent example of this convergence was seen during the Milan Design Week, with “Reference Library”, the project by Apartamento created together with Jil Sander and the Milanese studio studioutte. The installation exhibited 60 books selected by writers, designers, artists, and architects, transforming the volume into an almost ritual object. Orderly lecterns, beams of warm light, limited entries, and white gloves to flip through the books: the experience evoked both a museum and domestic intimacy.

The project presented itself as “an affirmation of the book as an object and of reading as an act of attention.” In a present dominated by skimming, algorithms, and pre-set paths, it insisted on the idea of reading as a slow, deliberate, and personal activity.

For Marco Velardi, publisher of Apartamento, a book, like a well-crafted garment, is a conscious act of intention, built to last. Does this transformation of the book into an aesthetic object necessarily distance it from reading? Or can it become a way to reactivate the desire to pick it up, own it, and read it?

Alessandro Ludovico, media theorist and author of Post-Digital Print. La mutazione dell’editoria dal 1894 — now republished by Timeo with a paperback marked by fingerprints in UV — says he is optimistic: “In the new generations I seem to catch positive signs, with an interest, reinforced by an aestheticization that now crosses all media, for the printed page.”

 Reading on paper continues, in fact, to produce a different immersion compared to continuous scrolling or short videos. And, he adds, “a book, once purchased, remains totally ours.” The digital present seems then to reactivate a longer history, in which the book has always been desired for its form as well. In Italy, this imaginary passes above all through editorial series: i Gialli Mondadori, i Coralli Einaudi, la Biblioteca Adelphi.

 In those same years, Bob Noorda and Massimo Vignelli designed the Serie Cultura SC/10 for Feltrinelli, one of the first affordable and serial quality paperbacks. Also for this reason, contemporary cases can be read as experiments on format and on the relationship between text and object. Saul Marcadent, professor at Iuav University of Venice, cites the microscopic magazine produced by the team of The Gentlewoman for the tenth anniversary of the magazine: “The change of scale was not a simple downsizing but a conceptual operation: the materials were reinterpreted through graphic design,” he says.

For Marcadent, experimentation in the materiality of printed objects remains fundamental: “I like to understand the page as a curatorial surface. Reading is a multi-sensory and physical activity, connected to cultural rituals and habits. The printed page, no longer bound to the need to transfer information, can today be understood as a space for contemplation and vertical deep dive.” Gérard Genette wrote that everything that surrounds the text — the cover, the title, the way a volume presents itself — is never secondary. It is the threshold through which we enter reading. In the era of screens, the book did not survive by becoming invisible. It did the opposite: it transformed itself into an image.

Featured image: Jacob Elordi, 2025. Photo by air6oll via X