Adrian Dominic Sinclair Johns (born 19 October 1965[1]) is a British-born academic.
[2] He joined the University of Chicago faculty in 2001,[3] and was appointed the Allan Grant Maclear Professor of History.
[5] Johns is best known for his works on the history of information, particularly The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making[6] and Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates.
[7] Johns met Alison Winter at Cambridge in 1987, and the two married in 1992.
[9] In 2002, Johns was involved in a debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein in the American Historical Review over the degree to which printing was necessarily an agent of change (which Eisenstein had argued) or, as Johns claimed, a vehicle of change which carried messages that were mostly shaped by outside social forces.