Printed books also reinforce, through their form, the separation between writer and author. In a printed book, notes made by a reader in the margin are eternally resigned to remain just that: marginalia. Unlike manuscripts, where notes written in the margins have the same status as the writing itself (and may, in later copies, be incorporated into the manuscript), books differentiate between the author's words and the reader's comments. The author, then, is the source of all meaning. "By ensuring that the reader cannot enter into the space the text occupies, printing encouraged worshipful reading"(Bolter, 152).
While modern printing methods allowed more people to have access to books, it made it more difficult to get a text into circulation in the first place. According to Bolter, printed works "made authors special by providing them with a writing space not available to other literate men and women. It is no accident that the age of printing became obsessed with assigning authorship and verifying texts"(Bolter, 152).