Review of Tyson E. Lewis, On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality Routledge, 2013 Derek R. Ford Published online: 21 September 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 In early July I receive an e-mail from the book review editor of SPED asking whether I would be willing to accept an electronic review copy of Tyson E. Lewis’ new book, On Study: Giorgio Agamben and Educational Potentiality, instead of a hard copy. When I receive the ‘‘e-inspection copy’’ I click on a link and am taken to the virtual space where the book is housed. I look to the bottom right of the screen and find that I have 960 min to read the book. After some more digging, I find that I can open the book 100 times during a period of 180 days, and each ‘‘session’’ lasts 960 min. Not to worry, the computer will do the counting for me. I think to myself, ‘‘How many times do I open a book while reading it?’’ My next move, one that comes almost instinctively, is to try and print the book out by taking screen shots of each page. I try this, but the words on the screen become blurred, due either to the e-reader technology or my computer. In any case, 949 min left in this session. Just a few pages into Lewis’ On Study I begin to understand the particular social, political, economic, and educational configuration in which I am engaging and experi- encing the book: biocapitalism. As a form of capitalism, biocapitalism ‘‘does not depre- ciate or use-up one’s labor power so much as continually invests in the production and reproduction of such power’’ (Lewis 2013, pp. 3–4). Part and parcel of biocapitalism is the use of biotechnologies, which are used to reduce life ‘‘to quantifiable numbers that can be compiled to facilitate the maximum output of our various potentialities’’ (Lewis 2013, p. 4). I begin to see how the e-inspection copy of Lewis’ book is precisely such a bio- technology. The activity of reading the book is monitored and recorded, possibly flowing back to a database where it can be used to gauge whether or not the settings for the book (or books of similar length) can be reduced or otherwise altered. A traditional Marxist critique might focus on the production process of the book, the fact that the publisher wants to reduce the turnover time between and labor-time within the production, distribution, and consumption of the book, and these economic imperatives are surely important. One crucial aspect which this analysis would fail to account for, however, is ‘‘the educational D. R. Ford (&) Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University, 350 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA e-mail: drford@syr.edu 123 Stud Philos Educ (2014) 33:105–111 DOI 10.1007/s11217-013-9375-2