E-books, like the computers that you must currently employ to obtain access to them, need some puzzling-over. Still, we try. But the anomaly is there. An e-book: this digital, intuitively malleable thing: is as frozen in time as is its print 'equivalent' (as we like to say). The e-book edition of Quicksilver that you are reading, incidentally, was published many months after its first hardcover edition and may or may not have incorporated the various fixes that get made to book files as they are prepared for eventual paperback publication. (In other words, there are errors herein, but simply running spell-check was not an option.)