Naturally, texture, sound, and smell may affect the reading experience, but not the work itself. Many electronic document carriers are multimedia-capable, but some of them actually use fewer modes than the book. All of them carry texts in the sense that the spoken or sung word is also text. Reading, listening, and viewing are the basic ways to use these media. Radio, film, CD-ROMs, and Internet documents all have their distinctive profiles, many of them with multimedia capability, but they are also restricted to carrying sequential texts by the very temporality of the medium.
Books can be beautiful.
But paradoxically, they are commonly meant to be read, not to be gazed upon. Lanham reminds us that such artistic devices were used by, for example, early modernists such as Dadaists and Futurists, but remarks that such printings were never more than marginal experiments in the print culture. Behind all of these inventions lie technological advancements. This reality effect is not as easily discernible when it comes to printed letters. Such questions are, of course, absurd and unanswerable from the convention of stable transparency now governing print culture.