A physical book is good for much more than reading. In our house, we have several large art books propping up a movie projector. A thin paperback is wedged under a couch leg in a spot where our old floors are especially uneven. One summer we pressed wildflowers between the pages of a gigantic book about the Louvre, and later used it to flatten out a freshly purchased Radiohead poster. I am not the first person to choose a large, sturdy book as an impromptu cutting board: the cover of the Exeter Book, a tenth-century repository of Anglo-Saxon literature, bears knife marks from what looks like chopping. Stains on its ancient vellum suggest that, like the big atlas of Vermont in our living room, it was also possibly used as a drink coaster. Twenty years ago, I had a very large bump on my wrist. The doctor examined it and told me it was a harmless fluid deposit—nothing to worry about. His remedy, delivered cheerfully in a French accent, has stuck with me: “Slam it with a book.”

As Leah Price suggests in her brisk new study, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading” (Basic), physical books—which, ten or so years ago, many fretted might soon be obsolete—show no signs of going away. Nobody would try to pop a cyst with a Kindle or prop open a window with a phone.

I am writing this on a laptop in a room designed almost entirely for reading physical books—a room that now bears “the ghostly imprint of outdated objects,” as Price puts it. Prolonged arrangement of the body in relation to a book seems to require a whole range of supporting matter—shelves, lamps, tables, “reading chairs”—not strictly necessary for the kinds of work a person does on a screen. Take away the book and the reader, and the whole design of the room starts to feel a little sad, the way a nursery feels once the baby grows up. Insert, where the reader was, a person on his device, and function becomes décor—which, Price suggests, is what books now are for many of us. As their “contents drift online,” books and reading environments have been imbued “with a new glamor,” turned into symbols of rich sentience in a world of anxious fidgeting. When Wallace Stevens, the supreme poet of winter dusk, celebrated the “first light of evening,” it was likely a reading lamp. The glow of a screen as darkness encroaches seems, by comparison, eerie and malevolent.

But it was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on. This is in part because, as Price argues, it never exactly existed to begin with. Far from embodying an arc of unbroken concentration, books have always mapped their readers’ agitation—not unlike the way a person’s browsing history might reveal a single day’s struggle, for example, to focus on writing a book review.

There are famous examples: the pages of Ernest Hemingway’s unbound press copy of Joyce’s “Ulysses” are mostly uncut. We can’t be sure of what he read, but we can see what he didn’t, or couldn’t, have read in his own copy. The margins of early printed books are full of waggish doodles—a bagpiping monkey, a knight jousting with a snail. Marginalia can record boredom, distraction, and mental drift, or even the refusal to read: in my used copy of John Milton’s “Comus,” the text is covered in elaborate calligraphic “Z”s, to denote snoring. (The classroom doodle ought to be recognized as a special genre of illustration.) Some scribbles in books act as a warning against reading. In grad school, I came upon a copy of the scholar Newton Arvin’s great study of Hawthorne in Harvard’s Lamont Library. Arvin, like Hester Prynne, the heroine of “The Scarlet Letter,” was persecuted for perceived sexual deviancy. He was arrested by the Massachusetts State Police and forced to retire by Smith College, his reputation ruined. On the title page of the book, under his name, was a reader’s inscription accusing him of “dealing in pornography, homosexuality + intercourse with Animals.” (This last charge was purely apocryphal.) Later, another reader came to his defense in the margins: “So what?” The book is still in the stacks.

Price, who has taught English at Cambridge, Harvard, and Rutgers universities, is the founding director of the Rutgers Book Initiative, a wide-ranging venture that promotes book history at universities and libraries. She is not an elegist for print: her extraordinary grasp of every development in book history, from incunabula to beach reads, monasteries to bookmobiles, suggests that a love of printed matter need not be a form of nostalgia. She warns of the danger of turning books into a “bunker,” a place to wait out the onslaught of digital life. Print, she reminds us, was itself once a destabilizing technology.

In Price’s radical view, a book might act something like a switchboard, connecting readers who connect to it. Though Price’s title riffs on the famous Raymond Carver short-story collection, substituting “books” for “love,” the most important word is, in fact, “talk.” Her book, and my review, and the attention you bring to both, are examples of the very kind of “talk” across every conceivable platform that Price finds so plentiful and so encouraging in the digital age. What we now possess, in her mostly cheery view, are “places and times” in which readers can “have words with one another.” These infrastructures, as Price calls them, do more to “shape reading” than “whether we read in print or online or in some as-yet-unimagined medium.” And these reading infrastructures are more varied and more durable than ever before, even if people are reading on their devices. The important thing is the “interactions through which we get our hands on books,” as well as those that “awaken a desire for them.”

As Price notes, many old-fashioned infrastructures are enjoying an unlikely comeback, sometimes by baiting the trap: libraries now get people in the door by loaning lawnmowers, croquet sets, cake pans, and other nonliterary essentials. Public libraries, which became common in the mid-nineteenth century, “form a testing ground for hopes and fears about civic connection,” like public pools. Also like public pools, they call up a recent past when not every citizen was welcomed. Books themselves were viewed by some Victorians as dangerous vehicles of contagion. Certain libraries still have the weird antiseptic feeling of a hospital ward. And they tend to reproduce the hierarchies of whatever community they serve. In her poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” Tracy K. Smith imagines outer space as a utopian “library in a rural community” where the segregationist past is rejected and the pencils are “gnawed on by the entire population.” If you’re driving through, say, Peacham, Vermont, and want to see what the community values, the bulletin board at the little library is the best place to start.