Howard, Nicole. Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500–1750

When new technologies appear on the scene, there are always zealous early adopters who whole-heartedly embrace innovation.But there are also people who are decidedly more circumspect, who are dubious about change and the trade-offs associated with abandoning a time-tested tool or practice in favour of an untried one.In the Digital Age, people have had to weigh the benefits of rapid communication and expanded access to information against the deficits associated with a loss of privacy and the surge in mis-and disinformation.Though it is increasingly difficult to accomplish, people do "opt out" of aspects of digital culture-choosing landlines over smartphones, broadsheets over tweets, and social gatherings over social media.And while few in the twenty-first century would consider movable-type-printing dangerous and socially disruptive, the Printing Revolution caused a great deal of consternation, even among the most forward-looking scholars of the day.In Loath to Print: The Reluctant Scientific Author, 1500-1750, Nicole Howard explores why and how many eminent astronomers, mathematicians, and natural philosophers-thinkers who relied on intellectual exchange and invited critiques of their work-either eschewed print or developed strategies to mitigate the perceived perils associated with mechanical reproduction.Absorbing and astute, Howard's book expands upon and complicates preceding studies focused on the history of print (including her own The Book: The Life Story of a Technology [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005]) and the history of science, demonstrating not only how the broader "world of print was messy and complex" but also how it was especially problematic for scientific authors whose reputations, livelihoods, and, potentially, even their lives depended upon not being misattributed or misapprehended (6).Howard argues that while print promised the promulgation of new ideas, for some scientists, that promise came with an attendant fear of losing control of one's intellectual property, which could only be assuaged once authors "found alternative ways to bend print to meet their needs, " strategies that also included bending readers' access to and perceptions of what they read (175).The introduction to Loath to Print declares that the "book is as much a history of communication in the early modern scientific community as it

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