Book Traces was a very interesting course. I really like the way the professor, Andrew Stauffer, showed how annotations and note-taking were different the modern world than in the past. It was like looking at several ancient artifacts from the past. People seem to have felt different about books as tools. Though readers then and now have the same idea about reader response theory, their interpretations were different. I feel that the reason reader responses changed is because of the separate realities which we live in. In our own modern world, we have technology that remains central to our every day lives. People can exchange information not only to our friends, but with people from around the entire world. Individuals use television as their primary source of news. Whereas in the past, the only way to reach someone was through telegrams or telephones. The only source of news individuals had was whatever newspaper they could even get. It seems that books were, and still are, the most central form of communication. Even with the existence of the internet, people still take the time to write books, fiction or nonfiction, to communicate their thoughts and ideas. And people still read them. Even though technology is integral for most of our every day needs, we still turn to old fashion technologies to gain different insights on different subjects. I am glad to have attended Andrew Stauffer’s Book Traces, because now I have new insight on how people exchanged information with one another.