This strategy of using databases online to make otherwise rare texts widely accessible and searchable was in keeping with what we now call “digital humanities” research. What happened next, in the middle of building the database, was a recognition that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown’s machine — or through the analogous interface standing in for the machine and constructed on a website (readies.org) — did not simply present a database of searchable texts. Instead, it simulated how one might have experienced using Bob Brown’s machine back in 1931 as if it was made in the twenty-first century. That is, the simple database and peculiar interface, changed how one reads; it even changed the essence of what one reads. Now, issues of speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance. Yes, these issues were already apparent in reading printed texts, but they were not stressed or highlighted as they became in the interactive interface. Mundane aspects of every literary text, like punctuation, now represented an illegible and non-representational visual cue rather than a direct link to the phonocentric pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. Usually an em-dash, for example, cues a reader to pause, but in the readies, the em-dash cues the eye to increase the speed and skip to the next word. At high rates of speed reading becomes a visual experience without any sounding out words. Punctuation cues a reader’s voice, whether reading aloud or silently, but in the readies, the punctuation circumvents the voice to cue the reader’s eyes. Suddenly, the “digital humanities” effort looked more like a Derridean experiment in grammatological reading, or what Greg Ulmer would call an “applied grammatology.” That is, the project suggested a future of reading, that will involve new devices like e-readers, and will change the definition and practice of what we call reading and even introduce an electracy.