A Second Age of Incunabula

September 6, 2011 Electronic Reading 6 comments
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What a difference a few years can make.  I’m talking about the proliferation of e-reading devices among my Indiana University undergraduates — devices that were virtually non-existent in their lives not so very long ago.  Let me explain.Бассейны. Сделать бассейн

In 2006, I piloted a course based loosely on The Late Age of Print called “The Cultures of Books and Reading.”  We ended, predictably, with a unit on the future of books in an age of digital media.  We read (among other things) a chapter or two from Sven Birkerts’ Gutenberg Elegies, in addition to Kevin Kelly’s provocative essay from The New York Times Magazine, “Scan This Book!”  The materials provoked some intriguing thoughts and conversation, but it seemed to me as if something was missing; it was as though the future of books and reading wasn’t palpable yet, and so most everything we talked about seemed, well, a little ungrounded.  Remember — this was about a year before the first Kindle landed, three years before the Barnes & Noble Nook, and a full four years before the release of the iPad.  We’re talking ancient history in today’s technological terms.

When I taught the course two years later, things had changed — somewhat.  There was genuine curiosity about e-reading, so much so that a group of students asked me to bring in my Kindle, hoping to take it for a test drive.  I did, but didn’t realize that the battery had died.  The demonstration ended up being a bust, and worse still, it was the last day of class.  In other words, no do-overs.  Still, that didn’t stop some of the students from writing papers about the possibilities e-readers held for them and their peers.  While I appreciated the argument — and indeed, the earnestness — I ended up being a little disappointed by those papers.  On the whole they were flatly celebratory.  The lack of critical perspective was, I believe, a function of their having had little to no actual interaction with e-reading devices.

Now it’s 2011, and I’m teaching the course once again.  Boy, have things changed!  On day one I asked the group of 35 if any of them owned an e-reader.  I expected to see maybe a few hands, since I’m aware of the reports stating that these devices have had more uptake among older users.  Much to my surprise, around half the class raised their hands.  We’re talking mostly 20 year-olds here.  I had to know more.  Some told me they owned a Kindle, others a Nook, and still others said they were iPad people who read using apps.  In a couple of instances they owned more than one of these devices.  They especially liked the convenience of not having to lug around a bag full of heavy books, not to mention the many public domain texts they could download at little or no cost.

There I was, standing in front of a group of students who also happened to be seasoned e-book readers.  Because they’d self-selected into my class, I knew I needed to be mindful about the extent to which their interest in electronic reading could be considered representative of people their age.  Even so, it was clear on day one that our conversations would be very different compared to those I’d had with previous cohorts in “The Cultures of Books and Reading.”

At the end of class a student approached me to ask about which version of Laura Miller’s Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, one of the required texts, he should buy.  Old analog me assumed he was referring to cloth or paper, since I’d brought in my hardback copy but told the group I’d ordered paperbacks through the bookstore.  My assumption was wrong.  He told me that he wanted to purchase the Kindle edition but had some hesitations about doing so.  How would he cite it, he asked?  I said he should go ahead and acquire whichever version most suited him; the citations we could figure out.

A very different conversation indeed — one that I expect will become much more the norm by the time I teach “The Cultures of Books and Reading” the next time around.  For now, though, here go the 36 of us, slouching our way into a moment in which analog and digital books commingle with one another.  It reminds me a little of the first 100 years of printing in the West — the so-called “age of incunabula,” when manuscripts, printed editions, and hybrid forms all co-existed, albeit not so peaceably.  I wonder if, at some point in the future, historians will begin referring to our time as the second age of incunabula.

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And…We're Back!

August 29, 2011 Bookselling, Electronic Reading, Quick Takes, Site Info No comments
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It’s been awfully quiet around here for the past six weeks or so.  I’ve had a busy summer filled with travel, academic writing projects, and quality time with my young son.  Blogging, regretfully, ended up falling by the wayside.

I’m pleased to announce that The Late Age of Print is back after what amounted to an unannounced — and unintended — summer hiatus.  A LOT has gone in the realm of books and new media culture since the last time I wrote: Apple clamped down on third parties selling e-books through the iPad; Amazon’s ad-supported 3G Kindle debuted; Barnes & Noble continues to elbow into the e-book market with Nook; short-term e-book rentals are on the rise; J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore website went live, leaving some to wonder about the future of publishers and booksellers in an age when authors can sell e-editions of their work directly to consumers; and much, much more.

For now, though, I thought I’d leave you with a little something I happened upon during my summer vacation (I use the term loosely).  Here’s an image of the Borders bookstore at the Indianapolis Airport, which I snapped in early August — not long after the chain entered liquidation:

The store had been completely emptied out by the time I returned.  It was an almost eerie site — kind of like finding a turtle shell without a turtle inside antabuse tablets 500mg.  Had I not been in a hurry (my little guy was in tow), I would have snapped an “after” picture to accompany this “before” shot.  Needless to say, it’s been an exciting and depressing summer for books.

Then again, isn’t it always?  More to come…soon, I promise.

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…in translation

July 15, 2011 About the Book, Quick Takes One comment
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Great news, y’all. About a month ago I received a copy of the Korean translation of my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control! I’m thrilled, needless to say, and even a bit surprised. Last summer the publisher of the English language edition, Columbia University Press, let me know that the translation was in the works, but honestly I didn’t expect it to surface for…oh, I don’t know, a few years, I suppose. And yet, here it is, now. Can’t you tell how giddy this makes me?Флора и Фауна Земли – экваториальный и субэкваториальный пояса

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The picture appearing above is of the new cover, which a former student of mine was kind enough to translate into English. A big thanks to him, as well as to Columbia U.P., the Korean Publishing Association, and the translator (whose name, unfortunately, is partially cut off from the annotated cover) for all their dedication to the project.

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A World Without Oprah

June 2, 2011 About the Book 6 comments
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Most of you probably already know that the final broadcast of The Oprah Winfrey Show aired Wednesday, May 25, 2011.  After 25 years of hosting the popular syndicated talk show, Oprah decided it was time to move on.Бакланы

Of course, what that also means is the end of Oprah’s Book Club, which some credit with having “changed the way America reads.”  Others go further, suggesting that the Club “changed America” during its 15 year run, from 1996-2011.  I offer a more measured view in Chapter 4 of The Late Age of Print, where I focus on the strategies Oprah used to connect novels and some nonfiction works with actual and potential readers.

Whatever way you cut it, we now live in a world without daily appearances by Oprah.  I’m sure that upsets a great many people — individuals who, like my mother, dutifully tuned in most weekday afternoons to watch her show.  For them it’s as if an old friend has moved away.

Others, though, are overjoyed to finally see her go.  I could point you in the direction of any number of books and internet sites that hate on Oprah.  (Mostly they accuse her of having popularized therapy culture in the United States.)  Instead, I thought a little Late Age of Print back-story might provide a different perspective on why certain people aren’t saying “goodbye” to Oprah as much as “good riddance.”

I was fortunate to have had a bunch of generous souls read drafts of my book before Columbia University Press published it in 2009.  The feedback was rich and varied, and it certainly helped to improve the manuscript.  One strange thing kept cropping up, though.  The reviewers either loved or hated Chapter 4.

The two who most disliked it went as far as to recommend that I drop it from the book.  Essentially they were asking me to write about the past and present of popular book culture in the United States as if the Club never existed.  What they wanted was a world without Oprah.

Needless to say, I thought the suggestion was absurd.  The Oprah chapter was and is integral to the “consumerism” part of my “consumerism to control” argument, plus it sets up and is a foil of sorts to the next chapter, on Harry Potter protectionism.

What’s telling is that both of the readers who suggested cutting Oprah keyed into my discussion of the Jonathan Franzen and James Frey controversies but completely overlooked the bulk of Chapter 4; mostly I explore how people featured on the Oprah show — the vast majority of whom were women, and many, women of color — read and responded to the Book Club selections.  In the end, I believe the reviewers’ objections to the chapter had less to do with my arguments and analysis and more to do with their lingering disdain for all things Oprah.

Thankfully my a-m-a-z-i-n-g editor at Columbia, Philip Leventhal, had the good sense to let me keep the chapter.  The many positive reviews I’ve since received of the book, and of the Oprah chapter in particular, would seem to confirm that I did manage to say something worthwhile there.

The funny thing is, despite the focus, Chapter 4 isn’t fundamentally about Oprah or her Book Club.  It’s more of an attempt to answer the question, What gets people excited about books and reading today?  That’s something everybody invested in book culture ought to be asking, from authors, publishers, and booksellers to librarians, teachers, parents, and beyond. Whether you like Oprah or not is beside the point.

Still, what made Oprah’s Book Club fascinating for me were the clever ways Winfrey and her producers responded to that question: by making book reading a more social — and sociable — activity; troubling generic distinctions between literature and life; touring viewers around bookstores; strategizing how to squeeze reading time into busy schedules; and varying the degree of difficulty of the selections so as not to alienate anyone.  They came up with these ideas, incidentally, by listening closely to readers and their needs.

Would that our English teachers (or reviewers) listened so well.  Farewell, Oprah, and thank you.  Your talk show may be gone, but you’ll always be a part of my world.

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The Billion Dollar Book

May 2, 2011 Algorithmic Culture, Bookselling One comment
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About a week ago Michael Eisen, who teaches evolutionary biology at UC Berkeley, blogged about a shocking discovery one of his postdocs had made in early April.  The discovery happened not in his lab, but of all places on Amazon.com.abisgroup.ru

While searching the site for a copy of Peter Lawrence’s book The Making of a Fly (1992), long out of print, the postdoc happened across two merchants selling secondhand editions for — get this — $1.7 million and $2.2 million respectively!  A series of price escalations ensued as Eisen returned to the product page over following days and weeks until one seller’s copy topped out at $23 million.

But that’s not the worst of it.  One of the comments Eisen received on his blog post pointed to a different secondhand book selling on Amazon for $900 million.  It wasn’t an original edition of the Gutenberg Bible from 1463, nor was it a one-of-a-kind art book, either.  What screed was worth almost $1 billion?  Why, a paperback copy of actress Lana Turner’s autobiography, published in 1991, of course!  (I suspect the price may change, so in the event that it does, here’s a screen shot showing the price on Saturday, April 30th.)

Good scientist that he is, Eisen hypothesized that something wasn’t right about the prices on the fly book.  After all, they seemed to be adjusting themselves upward each time he returned to the site, and like two countries engaged in an arms race, they always seemed to do so in relationship to each other.  Eisen crunched some numbers:

On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook [one of the sellers] was 1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath [the other seller].  And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged. (emphasis added)

So the culprit behind the extraordinarily high prices wasn’t a couple of greedy (or totally out of touch) booksellers.  It was, instead, the automated systems — the computer algorithms — working behind the scenes in response to perceived market dynamics.

I’ve spent the last couple of blog posts talking about algorithmic culture, and I believe what we’re seeing here — algorithmic pricing — may well be an extension of it.

It’s a bizarre development.  It’s bizarre not because computers are involved in setting prices (though in this case they could have been doing a better job of it, clearly).  It is bizarre because of the way in which algorithms are being used to disrupt and ultimately manipulate — albeit not always successfully — the informatics of markets.

Indeed, I’m becoming  convinced that algorithms (at least as I’ve been talking about them) are a response to the decentralized forms of social interaction that grew up out of, and against, the centralized forms of culture, politics, and economics that were prevalent in the second and third quarters of 20th century.  Interestingly, the thinkers who conjured up the idea of decentralized societies often turned to markets — and more specifically, to the price system — in an attempt to understand how individuals distributed far and wide could effectively coordinate their affairs absent governmental and other types of intervention.

That makes me wonder: are the algorithms being used on Amazon and elsewhere an emergent form of “government,” broadly understood?  And if so, what does a billion dollar book say about the prospects for good government in an algorithmic age?

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Culturomics

April 5, 2011 Algorithmic Culture, Digital Humanities 2 comments
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I learned last month from Wired that something along the lines of what I’ve been calling “algorithmic culture” already has a name — culturomics.lux-standart.ru

According to Jonathan Keats, author of the magazine’s monthly “Jargon Watch” section, culturomics refers to “the study of memes and cultural trends using high-throughput quantitative analysis of books.”  The term was first noted in another Wired article, published last December, which reported on a study using Google books to track historical, or “evolutionary,” trends in language.  Interestingly, the study wasn’t published in a humanities journal.  It appeared in Science.

The researchers behind culturomics have also launched a website allowing you to search the Google book database for keywords and phrases, to “see how [their] usage frequency has been changing throughout the past few centuries.”  They follow up by calling the service “addictive.”

Culturomics weds “culture” to the suffix “-nomos,” the anchor for words like economics, genomics, astronomy, physiognomy, and so forth.  “-Nomos” can refer either to “the distribution of things” or, more specifically, to a “worldview.”  In this sense culturomics refers to the distribution of language resources (words) in the extant published literature of some period and the types of frameworks for understanding those resources embody.

I must confess to being intrigued by culturomics, however much I find the term to be clunky. My initial work on algorithmic culture tracks language changes in and around three keywords — information, crowd, and algorithm, in the spirit of Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society — and has given me a new appreciation for both the sociality of language and its capacity for transformation.  Methodologically culturomics seems, well, right, and I’ll be intrigued to see what a search for my keywords on the website might yield.

Having said that, I still want to hold onto the idea of algorithmic culture.  I prefer the term because it places the algorithm center-stage rather than allowing it to recede into the background, as does culturomics.  Algorithmic culture encourages us to see computational process not as a window onto the world but as an instrument of order and authoritative decision making.  The point of algorithmic culture, both terminologically and methodologically, is to help us understand the politics of algorithms and thus to approach them and the work they do more circumspectly, even critically.

I should mention, by the way, that this is increasingly how I’ve come to understand the so-called “digital humanities.”  The digital humanities aren’t just about doing traditional humanities work on digital objects, nor are they only about making the shift in humanities publishing from analog to digital platforms.  Instead the digital humanities, if there is such a thing, should focus on the ways in which the work of culture is increasingly delegated to computational process and, more importantly, the political consequences that follow from our doing so.

And this is the major difference, I suppose, between an interest in the distribution of language resources — culturomics — and a concern for the politics of the systems we use to understand those distributions — algorithmic culture.

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Algorithmic Culture, Redux

March 15, 2011 Algorithmic Culture 6 comments
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Back in June I blogged here about “Algorithmic Culture,” or the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of people, places, objects, and ideas using computational processes.  (Think Google search, Amazon’s product recommendations, who gets featured in your Facebook news feed, etc.)  Well, for the past several months I’ve been developing an essay on the theme, and it’s finally done.  I’ll be debuting it at Vanderbilt University’s “American Cultures in the Digital Age” conference on Friday, March 18th, which I’m keynoting along with Kelly Joyce (College of William & Mary), Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois), and Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University).  Needless to say, I’m thrilled to be joining such distinguished company at what promises to be, well, an event.
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The piece I posted originally on algorithmic culture generated a surprising — and exciting — amount of response.  In fact, nine months later, it’s still receiving pingbacks, I’m pretty sure as a result of its having found its way onto one or more college syllabuses.  So between that and the good results I’m seeing in the essay, I’m seriously considering developing the material on algorithmic culture into my next book.  Originally after Late Age I’d planned on focusing on contemporary religious publishing, but increasingly I feel as if that will have to wait.

Drop by the conference if you’re in or around the Nashville area on Friday, March 18th.  I’m kicking things off starting at 9:30 a.m.  And for those of you who can’t make it there, here’s the title slide from the PowerPoint presentation, along with a little taste of the talk’s conclusion:

This latter definition—culture as authoritative principle—is, I believe, the definition that’s chiefly operative in and around algorithmic culture. Today, however, it isn’t culture per se that is a “principle of authority” but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving out entropy, or in Matthew Arnold’s language, “anarchy.”  You might even say that culture is fast becoming—in domains ranging from retail to rental, search to social networking, and well beyond—the positive remainder of specific information processing tasks, especially as they relate to the informatics of crowds.  And in this sense algorithms have significantly taken on what, at least since Arnold, has been one of culture’s chief responsibilities, namely, the task of “reassembling the social,” as Bruno Latour puts it—here, though, by discovering statistical correlations that would appear to unite an otherwise disparate and dispersed crowd of people.

I expect to post a complete draft of the piece on “Algorithmic Culture” to my project site once I’ve tightened it up a bit. Hopefully it will generate even more comments, questions, and provocations than the blog post that inspired the work initially.

In the meantime, I’d welcome any feedback you may have about the short excerpt appearing above, or on the talk if you’re going to be in Nashville this week.

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Destroying Books in Order to Save Them

February 28, 2011 Book Art No comments
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One of the recurrent themes you’ll find here on the Late Age of Print blog is the “end of the book.”  Usually when I raise this I’m talking about printed books and the relationship they share to e-readers and other forms of digital technology.  And usually when I go down that road, I end up saying something to the effect of, “however popular e-books may become, printed books won’t ever go away entirely.”veroxybd.com

But today, thanks to a friend on Facebook who shared a fascinating blog post with me, I want to approach the “end of the book” theme from a different angle — where destroying a printed book may actually give it a completely new lease on life.

The post, “The Book Surgeon,” showed up a few days ago on My Modern Met. It consists mostly of photographs of the work of artist Brian Dettmer, who, using “using knives, tweezers, and surgical tools,” transforms old encyclopedias, medical journals, dictionaries, and other weighty reference matter into intricately detailed sculptures.  Here are a few images to show you what I mean:

Amazing, eh?  The post goes on to note — and this shouldn’t come as a surprise — that carving these books involves painstaking work.  Proceeding a single layer at a time, “Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures.”  There’s also no cutting and pasting of material from one point in a book to another.  In other words, everything that appears in each sculpture is ostensibly in its original location.

I wish I could watch Dettmer at work, since I imagine he must proceed with equal parts planning and serendipity.  Curious to learn more about his process, I checked out his artist’s statement where he says this:

The age of information in physical form is waning. As intangible routes thrive with quicker fluidity, material and history are being lost, slipping and eroding into the ether. Newer media swiftly flips forms, unrestricted by the weight of material and the responsibility of history. In the tangible world we are left with a frozen material but in the intangible world we may be left with nothing. History is lost as formats change from physical stability to digital distress.

Nicely put — and what an apt way in which to frame a body of work that so beautifully illustrates the principle of creative destruction.

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Now in Paperback

January 31, 2011 About the Book, Hype 5 comments
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Just after Christmas I promised there’d be a big announcement coming in the new year.  Well, a month in and here it is: The Late Age of Print is now available in paperback!  Yes folks, that’s right.  If you’ve been holding off buying the book because it was available only in hardback (and, ahem, free digital download), now’s your chance to pick up a copy all your own.vian34.ru

I’d be remiss not to mention that the paperback contains a new preface, written by me.  It offers something like a theory of the relationship of printed and electronic books, constructed around a distinction the Canadian media historian Harold Innis once drew between “time binding” and “space binding” technologies.  It also tries to walk the fine line between simply celebrating or bemoaning these different types of books, which is one of the recurrent themes you’ll find in Late Age. Here’s a little taste from the preface:

For Sven Birkerts, printed words possess “weight, grandeur,” while their electronic counterparts suffer because of their supposed “weightlessness.”  Could it be, though, that the turgidity of printed words, and hence the paper vessels containing them, quietly persuade us to settle for less authoritative, definitive, and elegant books than we deserve? Grandeur, perhaps. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that complacency follows all too easily in the wake of humankind’s most majestic accomplishments.

And more:

The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to ensure that we continue living in an expanding culture, which is to say, one that strikes a suitable balance between time- and space-binding technologies. This would be a culture in which neither printed nor electronic books exclusively ruled the day. Instead, it would be one in which the “p” and the “e” mingled promiscuously

The paperback is available from my publisher, Columbia University Press, as well as most major booksellers including IndieBound, Powells, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

If I get some time in the coming months I may try to redesign this site.  The look seems a little stale to me after two years, plus it would be nice to reboot The Late Age of Print blog on or near the occasion on the paperback’s release.  If there are things you like or dislike about the site or would like to see added, shoot me an email or leave a comment.  Since my goal isn’t just to make the site look better but to make it more reader-friendly, I’d appreciate your input.

Speaking of input, I’d also love to hear from those of you who’ve read the new preface to the paperback edition or, for that mater, from any of you who’ve read and want to discuss Late Age.

More anon…

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Bye-Bye Borders (in Bloomington)

January 13, 2011 Bookselling 5 comments
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Just before Christmas I blogged here about the closing of the Borders Bookstore here in my home community of Bloomington, Indiana.  Friday, January 7, 2011 was the store’s final day of operation.  I visited it for the last time on Wednesday, January 5th and snapped a few pictures.  Even for those of you who may never have set foot in this particular Borders location, you can tell that it was barely a shell of what it once was.

The montage of pictures above should give you a sense of what I mean by a “shell.”  The image appearing there on the bottom-left is, incidentally, of what used to be the children’s section, which is a far cry from how it used to look.  In fact, I have a quite vivid memory from the time I was researching The Late Age of Print. I hung out there practically all night on the evening of June 20th, 2003 in anticipation of the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Back then it was teeming with books, kids, caregivers, and energy.  Not so much now.

These two close-ups illustrate the scope of the sell-off.  It’s definitely an “everything must go” situation but more, no doubt a result of the chain’s economic woes, which extend far beyond this particular branch.  The picture on the right shows a bookshelf that’s been transformed into a display for cleaning agents — yes, cleaning agents — that are being sold off along with the store’s remaining inventory of books, DVDs, etc.  (Another display nearby held items from the café, including the mixes the baristas would use to make fancy drinks.)  Speaking of books, the vast majority of titles left were either category fiction (romances, sci-fi, etc.) or books by/about celebrities.  Note the unusually large stock of biographies of American Idol’s Sanjaya Malakar in the upper right-hand corner of the image at left.  It was, in other words, pretty much the bottom of the barrel by the time I got there.  Based on the uniformity of the inventory, I ‘d guess that most of the really desirable books had been carted off and redistributed to other Borders stores.

This final image shows a computer terminal located on what used to be the customer service counter.   Instead of facing the customer service agent, it had been turned around to face the customers, as if to greet us as we entered the store on its final days.  The display read, “Your Favorite Book Store.  Now Digital.”  I guess we know how Borders is imagining its future — assuming, of course, that it has one.

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