If a book is never read, does it exist?

Last week’s readings were, for me, very enjoyable. Probably because I was able to understand them coherently but also because I agree in the arguments presented. Sartre spoke of the simultaneous connection between the author and the reader and how the two share an on-going pact, or agreement, between the text and that this union is an active one. The reader feels what the characters feel, go through the same angst and complications that they do and are resolved when their characters triumph. Similar to Saussure and the structuralists, Heidegger spoke of the importance in language not as a device to convey poetry or prose but as the epicenter to our being. With that said in regards to the novel, it is what gives birth to the author. Its language creates the relationship between author and reader but also casts a shadow on the author. With the emergence of the reader comes the death of the author in Barthes view. Whence the reader becomes the controller of the text, investing time and emotions into the text then the author becomes irrelevant. For it is the reader who determines the outcome of the text, the author is merely a dictator, a scribe jotting down thoughts. So, like the age old question of the falling tree in the forest; if a book is never read, does it exist?