Cupiditas Librorum

A single book not only insinuates itself into our souls, it also allows the names 
of others to penetrate; and so the one brings in its wake the desire for others.
                                                                                      -- Petrarch

In 1338 the library of the Sorbonne, the riches library in Christendom, had only 338 books for consultation chained to its reading desks and 1,728 works for loan in its register, 300 of which were listed as lost.... The medieval university student's attitude toward the book was nothing like our own. When they sat down to read a page they struggled with every word and every phrase until they had totally assimilated it. Still, the relative scarcity of books had consequences: one of them--as is always the case when books are scarce--was specialization. A theologian would not have understood the vocabulary or the abbreviations of a jurist or physician, let alone his thoughts.
                                               Henri-Jean Marin, The History and Power of Writing (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Transport yourself to the year of 1338. One hundred years in the future the printing revolution will begin to show signs of germination; and by the year 1500 the technology of the printed book will have thoroughly changed the landscape of reading and writing in western Europe. As a medieval reader or medieval writer/copyist, what is fundamentally different about your relationship to the acts of reading and writing?