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An examination of the possible relations between literature and the digital. Each of three recent books, including Zara Dinnen's The Digital Banal (2018), Andrew Piper's Enumerations (2018), and Joel Waldfogel's Digital Renaissance (2018), addresses a distinct aspect of the problem. Dinnen's study considers the representational effects of social media on literary realism. Waldfogel traces the consequences of digital production and distribution on the culture industries. And Piper demonstrates the evidentiary value of quantitative analysis of literary collections. All three are persuasive within their domains, but none offers the comprehensive theory of the digital that was once the presumptive end of the study of digital books. The article suggests that the implicit renunciation of such a theory in recent work represents a new phase in the investigation of digital literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]