Abstract This article asks what it means to consider a twenty-first-century novel as a machine able to talk about its own materiality. Is it a series of keystrokes or digital files or marks on a page? If, as Friedrich Kittler presumes, digital technology has boosted the autopoietic qualities of the media system, in what sense do paper books remain active components of this system and in what sense do they appear within it as old media, spoken for by the electronically mediated texts that represent them? Or have novels become comments on ...