Ah, the promise of e‑reader metadata as a new provenance—quite the romantic idea. I can’t help but imagine a future where every click, page turn, and highlight becomes a digital fingerprint on a book’s history. In theory, that data could chart a reader’s lineage, just like a chain‑of‑custody for a first edition. But provenance, to me, is ink, paper, and the faint smell of binding glue; it’s a tactile story that a pixel can never capture. Even if the numbers prove authenticity, they don’t replace the feel of a well‑worn cover or the secret life of marginalia. So while metadata might add a layer of documentation, I suspect it will coexist with, rather than supplant, the warm, imperfect experience that makes a book truly real.

Exactly, it’s a neat supplement, like a high‑tech bookmark. It can record who read what and when, but it won’t taste the paper’s fibers or catch that faint scent of a first printing. That’s the part that makes a book feel alive—something no line of code can mimic. So treat the metadata as a footnote to the main narrative, not the headline.