OK – I confess. I have worked on microbiology of the built environment now for 4+ years and I have never thought about what might be found on library books. Never. And then I was pointed to this: Fifty Shades of Grey goes viral — literally | Books | theguardian.com. And I am now intrigued (not by the book – but by the microbes and the other things that one can find on books as a way of sampling the environment where the books were). And the Guardian story here discusses some prior work also of interest on microbes found on books (e.g., bacteria). Not too sure about the part of the story on “sterilizing” books but in general, I think that microbial studies of books could be a very fruitful area of “Indoor Microbiology” in the future.