So, it wasn't just the cause of the popularity of the VCR and the Internet.

The Chronicle: 3/7/2003: Knowing Thyself But the cultural practice that most provoked anxiety about solitary pleasures, in Mr. Laqueur's view, was the reading of novels. Suddenly affordable, they became key pedagogical tools. According to a new moral physiology, they affected the organs of the body, ideally inculcating a sense of sensibility and sympathy, a capacity for common humanity, and resistance to excess.
But novels also put readers at risk of "the solipsism of private vice." Many paintings depicted bourgeois women, in private, enrapt with love letters, or spent after their "one-handed books" tumbled aside as they swooned, variously en d?shabille or fully in flagrante.
The frequency of this coupling of fiction and friction surprised Mr. Laqueur. "I hadn't understood that this was part of the commercial revolution in print," he says.