The Late Age of Print » book form

What Publishing Can Learn, Part IV

Ted Striphas — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 12:45:42 +0000

This is the fourth installment in an occasional series reflecting on how the publishing industry might connect better with readers. You can read part I, on The Da Vinci Code, by clicking here; part II, on Oprah, is available here; and part III, on Netflix, is here.

IV. What can the publishing industry learn from Bullshit?

To begin, I should probably clarify what I mean by “Bullshit.” The capitalization here is purposeful. I’m referring to philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s notorious little book, On Bullshit, which was published in 2005 by Princeton University Press. It’s a 67-page stroke of genius. And I call it “genius” not because of the content per se; I’ll leave that to others to evaluate. It’s genius, rather, because of its diminutive size. What might the publishing industry learn from the form of this successful little book?

I remember well the first time that I stumbled across On Bullshit. I was trolling through the philosophy section of one of the bookstores here in Bloomington, Indiana, and there it was. It stood out from all the other volumes because of its compact size. They were weighty tomes: dense, intimidating — potentially intractable commitments. On Bullshit was something else: light, approachable — more like an enticing get-together than a long-term relationship. I couldn’t resist picking it up.

I’m sure the book’s success has had a great deal to do with the author’s reputation, the timeliness of his argument, and — let’s be honest — his decision to call the volume, On Bullshit. But I cannot help but wonder if its prosperity isn’t also and significantly attributable to its form.

There’s an analogous story to be told about economist Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It sold reasonably well in the United States upon its publication in 1944. What really launched the book into the stratosphere, however, was its Reader’s Digest condensation, released in 1945, which reached five million subscribers. The condensation was later republished as a small, stand-alone volume with an impressive initial print-run of 600,000.

More recently, Penguin released an abridgment of Adam Smith’s 900-page magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations (1776). This charming little duodecimo volume, called The Invisible Hand, weighs in at a comparatively scant 127 pages and, like On Bullshit, costs just ten bucks. You could probably read the shrunken Smith in a couple of hours, if that.

People today are working longer for less, and they inhabit a media environment that’s more crowded than ever. We also have grown accustomed to “disaggregated” works, in which part and whole share a less necessary relationship than they did, say, 20 years ago. (Witness, for example the decline of the long-play album and the return to power of the music single.) If books are to continue to thrive well into the 21st century, then book publishers will need to account for, and respond to, these changing circumstances. And one way in which to accomplish this might be to release more inexpensive, “snack-size” books.

By way of conclusion, a caveat: my argument shouldn’t be confused for a one-size-fits-all approach to book publishing. I’m not suggesting that small books should replace large books, categorically. (Incidentally, what we have now is pretty much a one-size-fits-all approach, albeit one that, for adults, privileges the tome.) Instead, I’m interested in a publishing paradigm that would offer more choice than what we currently have — a paradigm that’s more sensitive to the diverse contexts in which people live their daily lives.

And that’s no bullshit.

P.S. Happy New Year to all of my readers, and thank you for supporting The Late Age of Print – both the book and the blog.

Update, 2/10/2010: Here’s the link to an interesting story from The New York Times about “snack size” ebooks: http://s.nyt.com/u/eFh.

How the Books Saved Christmas

Ted Striphas — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:59:33 +0000

By the looks of things, 2009 is shaping up to be the year for giving the gift of books…e-books, that is.

Take the Amazon Kindle, for instance. Amazon.com is touting the device on its homepage as its “#1 bestselling, #1 most wished for, and #1 most gifted [is that really a verb?] product.” Sales surely have been helped along by the catchy little advertisement for Kindle embedded above, which has been appearing regularly on TV stations throughout the United States since November. You may not know this, but the commercial is the result of a contest that Amazon sponsored last summer, asking customers to produce their own 30-second spots showcasing the e-reader.

Over at the other end of the post-Gutenberg galaxy, meanwhile, Barnes & Noble has already exhausted its supply of Nooks. Don’t despair, though. In lieu of an actual Nook, the bookseller is more than happy to ship a holiday-themed certificate to you and yours explaining that the “hottest gift of the season may be sold out, but with our elegant Nook holiday certificate you can still let loved ones know it’s coming.” Uh, yeah — on or about February 1st. Happy holidays from the Grinch.

Clearly, retailers like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble are pinning their hopes for robust holiday sales significantly on digital devices, hoping that their customers will purchase not only the hardware but also an ample electronic library with which to fill it. The question, of course, is where are printed books in all this? Is all this holiday focus on digital reading yet another sign of the impending death of print — by which I mean not only of the technology itself, but also of the broader culture that surrounds it?

Hardly. What we’re bearing witness to, in fact, is the very culture that printed books long ago helped to introduce.

One of my favorite books is Stephen Nissenbaum’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated history, The Battle for Chritsmas (Vintage, 1997), which traces the origins of the modern commercial holiday. It used to be that Christmas was a raucous affair in which members of the lower castes of society were given temporary license to make unusual demands on social and economic elites. Often their requests were for food, drink, or money, and typically these “gifts” were given as a result of the implicit threat of violence. All that started to change in the 19th century, Nissenbaum shows, with the growth of industrial production and the gradual enfranchisement of the working class. Slowly but surely the social- and class-warfare that had defined the Christmas holiday was displaced onto parents and their children. And although the holiday mutated in significant ways and tensions defused, one thing remained pretty much the same: the promise of gifts was held out as compensation for the recipients’ continuing good behavior.

These gifts, however, typically weren’t perishables or cash tips. More likely there were items that had been purchased at stores. And among the first and most popular commercial goods to be given as Christmas presents were, according to Nissenbaum, printed books. Books played a starring role in helping to make Christmas over into the commercial holiday that people know and practice today.

Books may be going high-tech this holiday season, but that doesn’t mean, as some fear, that we’ve abandoned the cultural and economic habits they’ve helped to foster. Our Kindles and Nooks may appear to be pointing toward the digital future, yet if anything they channel the deep structures of our analog past.

In Medias Res

Ted Striphas — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:48:50 +0000

This week the blog In Medias Res, which is hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book, has gathered together a bunch of great contributions around the theme, “Books as Screens.” Definitely, definitely check them out.

On Monday Hollis Griffin of Northwestern University contributed a post called “Talking Heads: Books, Authors, and Television News.” There he explores the becoming-everyday of books and authors on TV, in an era of media deregulation and convergence. Yesterday one of his colleagues at Northwestern, Elizabeth Lenaghan, posted a provocative meditation called, “How Do you Hide Behind a Kindle?” She asks, “Apart from our ability to snoop on fellow train riders or pass quick judgment on a person’s taste, what are the potential consequences of fewer printed books in public spaces?” Today IMR is featuring my thoughts on “The Selling of Bookselling.” It’s largely a riff off of the themes I develop in Chapter 2 of The Late Age of Print, which explores the politics of retail bookselling in the United States. On Thursday we’ll see a post entitled “Possible or Probable? An Imagined Future of the Book” from Pomona College’s Kathleen Fitzpatrick. Capping things off on Friday will be New York University’s Lisa Gitelman, whose post is called “What Are Books?”

In Medias Res is an intriguing publication in that it asks contributors not to post per se but rather to briefly “curate” a film or video clip, often connected to some larger theme. I love that the blog is hosted by the Institute for the Future of the Book, and that Hollis Griffin and Elizabeth Lenaghan finally connected the dots between books and audiovisual media to give us our theme, “Books as Screens.” Thanks, you two! And thanks to all of you, my readers, for hopping on over to IMR to post comments.

A Big Week for Books (Week in Review)

Ted Striphas — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:24:40 +0000

I’ve been racking my brain for the last several days trying to figure out what to post next here on The Late Age of Print. The problem isn’t there there’s a lack of material to write about. If anything, there’s almost too much of it. And the fact that there is so much reveals one simple truth about books today: however much they may be changing, they’re hardly a moribund medium.

Consider, for example, Wednesday’s debate in the New York Times, “Does the Brain Like E-books?” The forum brought together writers and academics from a variety of disciplines (English, Child Development, Religious Studies, Neuroscience), asking them to weigh in on the question. Most intriguing to me is Professor Alan Liu’s contribution, in which he distinguishes between “focal” and “peripheral” attention. E-books, it seems, dispose readers toward the latter type of engagement.

In some ways the distinction Liu draws harkens back to the difference between “intensive” and “extensive” reading. The intensive mode refers to the deep reading of a small amount of texts, often multiple times, while the extensive mode designates a more cursory type of engagement with a significantly larger amount of texts. The claim among book historians is that the coming of print ushered in a new age of extensive reading, which in turn set in motion a mindful, but ultimately thinner, relationship to books and other types of printed artifacts. Could it be that in emphasizing “peripheral” attention, e-books are not breaking with but rather carrying on the legacy ushered in by print?

Next, Fast Company reports from the Frankfurt Book Fair on Google’s latest big announcement. The search engine giant (it seems silly to even call the company that anymore) will be launching an online e-book store called Google Editions, beginning in early 2010. What’s great about the service is that the e-titles won’t be device-specific, as in those created for the Amazon Kindle. The initial launch will include a half-million e-books, and presumably more will be added as the months and years go by.

I’m still trying to determine whether the the texts that Google will make available via Editions will include those that the company has scanned for its Google Books project. If that’s the case, then talk about the privatization of a public resource — practically all of the volumes having been housed originally in public libraries! And even if that’s not the case, isn’t it strange that the company will essentially be subsidizing its book scanning efforts by hocking electronic texts published by the very same outfits who are suing them for scanning?

Finally, we have an intriguing post from Nigel Beale over at Nota Bene Books: “Authors Claim Google’s Ability to Track Readers Puts Privacy at Risk.” Evidently the Electronic Frontier Foundation is contesting the proposed Google Book settlement, on the grounds that the search engine giant cannot protect the privacy of individuals who choose to read e-books through its burgeoning service.

I’ve been raising similar concerns recently in my speech about the Amazon Kindle. The device automatically archives detailed, even intimate, information about what and more importantly how people read on the Amazon server cloud. This kind of information is subject not 4th Amendment/search warrant protections but can instead be subpoenaed by prosecutors who are anxious to dig up dirt on suspects. The question I raise in the speech, and the question that also seems to emerge in the case of Google Books and the coming Editions service, is, what happens to a society when privacy is no longer the default setting for reading?

Whew. What a week for books indeed!

Now, About That Cover…

Ted Striphas — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:14:28 +0000

The Late Age of Print has been receiving lots of praise since its release back in March. What’s intriguing from an author’s standpoint is that the book’s cover has received almost as much attention as its content.

Some writers would be put off by this, believing that what really counts is the stuff that lies between the covers. Not I. I’m acutely aware that books are meant to be sold as much as they’re meant to be read. In fact, in my undergraduate “Cultures of Books and Reading Class,” I have an assignment in which I ask my students to “judge a book by its cover” — that is, to explain what they can learn about a book and its audience strictly by virtue of its design.

Anyway, scores of people have commented to me in person about The Late Age of Print’s eye-catching cover, and many have asked me to share the story behind it. I figured some of you reading might be interested to hear the story, too.

On the one hand, I had a strong sense of what I absolutely did not want to appear on the cover. Far too many books about books (as the genre is called) feature over-stuffed leather armchairs, hand-engraved mahogany bookcases, leather book marks, stacks of printed books shot in soft-focus, readers relaxing comfortably under a heap of toasty blankets — you get the drill. Basically, most books about books tend to aestheticize the printed book as an object by stressing its relationship to high culture. Since Late Age is largely about the book as an industrial artifact, I wanted something much grittier — plus, it never hurts to have a book cover that doesn’t look exactly like everyone else’s (more on that later).

On the other hand, I didn’t want to go too far in the opposite direction with the cover. That is, even though I didn’t want to overly-aestheticize books, I also didn’t want to convey a sense in which they were simply moribund things of the past. There’s a growing contingent of books about books that unfortunately tries to do exactly that. Most feature cover images in which book text is replaced with binary code or something to that effect, as if to convey the inevitable digitization — and by extension the disappearance — of the printed word. Books are changing, no doubt, but for my part I remain convinced that print in some form is here to stay.

So I didn’t want a cover that made books into romantic objects, nor did I want a cover that suggested that print was dead. The Late Age of Print is a book about the past, present, and future of book publishing, and so I knew early on that I wanted some type of cover image that would represent the themes of permanence and change. Much later, as I looked at the books about books appearing on my bookshelf at home, I decided that I wanted a more abstract type of design, since many titles in my opinion overly-literalized their subject matter.

To my good fortune, a friend of mine from graduate school happened upon the work of the Houston, Texas-based photographer, Cara Barer. Barer purchases old books, wets them, dries them, and then photographs them. I loved her process and the resulting images (there are many more besides the one appearing on my cover), which to my mind strikingly captured both the fragility and endurance of printed books. This was exactly the message I wanted to convey.

I wasn’t sure if my publisher, Columbia University Press, would be inclined to use one of her images, if for no other reason than I figured they must be pricey given their beauty. When filling out the section on cover art on my author questionnaire, I almost didn’t mention Barer’s work for that reason. In the end I decided to let it fly, and a few weeks later the designer returned with what is now the cover of Late Age. It was a stunning exercise in design minimalism, at least as far as I was (and am) concerned.

The postscript to this story is that others, apparently, have now discovered Barer’s images. The most prominent example can be seen in Michael Greenberg’s upcoming book, Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life (Other Press, September 2009), which a friend of mine alerted me to this summer:

Galley Cat noted the similarities in our covers earlier this week, and a commentator there linked to a whole blog devoted to look-alike covers. For my part I’m not bothered at all by the similarities, though I’d now be curious to hear the story behind Michael Greenberg’s cover.

Anthropodermic Bibliopegy

Ted Striphas — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:41:43 +0000

On Wednesday the LA Times book blog “Jacket Copy” made a gruesome discovery — a little-known (and hopefully long defunct) practice called anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the binding of books in human flesh. Yes, really.

The story actually broke on The International Journal of the Book blog. There, Dr. Margaret Zeegers reported that she “had never heard of such a thing” until reading a piece aptly entitled “Of Human Bondage” by Maryrose Cuskelly, which was published in last month’s Australian Literary Review.

Actually this is old news. Back in 1994 Professor Carolyn Marvin of Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication published a piece in The Quarterly Journal of Speech called, “The Body of the Text: Literacy’s Corporeal Constant.” Its focus is, among other things, anthropodermic bibliopegy. I reference the essay in passing in the Introduction to The Late Age of Print, where I mention “book history’s more sinister side.”

The response I’ve been hearing to the “Jacket Copy” and IJB posts has pretty much amounted to,”eww, isn’t that disgusting!?” That’s understandable, but it also completely avoids the question that anthropodermic bibliopegy now poses to us: how could it be that such a sickening practice was, for some people, not only acceptable but even desirable?

This is exactly what makes Professor Marvin’s research so compelling. Instead of avoiding the question she actually goes there, attempting to understand — but by no means explain away — why one human being would want to bind words and ideas in the flesh of another.

I cannot do justice to her essay here, but I’ll do my best to provide a quick summary. Marvin begins in the late-18th/early-19th centuries, when medical science — particularly surgery — was still in its infancy. At the time “surgeon” was hardly a respected profession. In fact most surgeons were also barbers, and in general the profession harbored strong connotations of manual labor. Surgery, that is to say, was hardly the white collar profession that it’s considered to be today.

So how as a budding surgeon in the 18th/19th centuries do you differentiate yourself from the rabble of manual laborers? How do you show that yours is a truly “cerebral” profession rather than “mere” handicraft? You take the flesh from the bodies of the indigent persons upon which you’ve been trying out your new surgical techniques and, rather than disposing of it, you use it to contain your budding corpus (pun intended) of medical knowledge. In other words, anthropodermic bibliopegy was a way for surgeons and other medical pracitioners to assert their professional and economic authority over others.

As I said, there’s much more to Professor Marvin’s essay, both conceptually and historically. It’s certainly worth the read — assuming you have the stomach for it.

Smellavision

Ted Striphas — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:55:06 +0000

It’s finally happened, at long last: scent has been brought to the world of audiovisual media. But it’s not television or movies leading the way. It’s books — or rather, e-books.

Here’s the lowdown. DuroSport Electronics, which, as far as I can tell, is a legitimate if little-known manufacturer of e-gadgets, has decided to branch out into somatic technologies — in this case, aerosol sprays that provide printed book-like atmosphere for your e-books. The company’s new product, Smell of Books, comes in five different aromas to please the sniffer of even the most discerning of bibliophiles: Classic Musty, Eau You Have Cats, New Book Smell, Scent of Sensibility, and (I’m still trying to get my head around this one) Crunchy Bacon. Maybe the latter is for people who keep cookbooks in their kitchens while playing lose and fast with the pork fat.

Anyway, Medialoper is quite down on Smell of Books, noting, for example, that New Book Smell is really just new car smell repackaged and repurposed. DuroSport evidently has issued a recall — assuming Smell of Books is an honest to goodness product.

Indeed I keep asking myself, is this for real? Smell of Books has just enough plausibility to be believable, given how bibliophiles (and by that I mean of the print-on-paper variety) wax on and on about the scents they associate with book reading. Yet, it’s also sufficiently doubt-inducing to raise my suspicions. I mean, “Eau You Have Cats?” Honestly? And why charge $29.99 a can for New Book Smell, but only $9.99 for Classic Musty? Something doesn’t quite add up.

Is canned aroma for e-books just an elaborate hoax? If not, is there actually a market for this stuff? Either way, I’m not buying it.

Remains of the Day

Ted Striphas — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:32:22 +0000

If you’ve read The Late Age of Print, then you’ll know that I’m not a technological reactionary. In my arsenal of gadgets you’ll find a much-loved iPod Touch, a less-loved Kindle 1.0, a mobile phone that I regularly use, and more. A friend of mine claims that I’m a gadget-head. Usually I beg to differ, but having just inventoried my electronic wares, I’m beginning to think that he may be on to something.

Here’s the thing, though: I also love books — and my that I mean, printed books. While I’d hardly consider myself to be a book fetishist (i.e., I’m not a devotee of Nicholas A. Basbanes), I’m a bibliophile in about the same way that I’m a gadget-head, that is, by default. Over the years I’ve accumulated a sizable library, mostly in my capacity as an academic; I love to read; and I annotate my books prodigiously, creating personalized indexes so that I can return easily to the passages I’ve underlined. Maybe one day I’ll scan and post one of these indexes here, so that you can see just how intensely I read.

Because I seem to be pulled in two different directions technologically speaking, I was immediately drawn to this week’s (June 8 & 15) cover of the New Yorker, pictured above. Its setting is a post-apocalyptic New York City. An alien has touched down and sits amid the ruins, surrounded by what appears to be e-waste. Discarded CDs, mobile phones, and computer keyboards abound. Also strewn amid the litter are devices that look suspiciously like Amazon Kindles. Our genial-looking alien relaxes with a tattered but still mostly intact printed book.

The New Yorker cover is a brilliant commentary on the particular bibliographic moment in which we are currently living. It seems as though electronic reading was the conversation at last week’s BookExpo America. The prevalence of that conversation tells us just how short-sighted — and indeed profit-obsessed — the book industry is becoming. The central problem with e-reading, beyond the temptation to overly-secure digital content, is that of endurance. Too many e-reading devices and too many digital formats result in too much of one thing: technological obsolescence.

If you don’t believe me, check out Chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print, where I discuss an early e-book experiment called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). You can find the text of the Agrippa story online, but unless you’re a collector of legacy technologies you pretty much cannot read it in its original form. It was encoded on a 3 1/2-inch floppy diskette (remember those?) that is incompatible with today’s hardware and operating systems.

The partisans of e-reading may well retort that printed books, like their electronic kin, also deteriorate. Paper can become brittle and, well, there’s a reason why the word “bookworm” exists in the English language. All true. But here I’m persuaded both by my own experience and by Nicholson Baker’s wonderful book, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (Random House, 2001). Baker shows us how even just a modicum of care can help print-on-paper books to endure for centuries. The “slow fires” that the proponents of micro-media first advanced and that the denizens of e-books now expound are pretty much smoke and mirrors.

For e-reading to succeed, there will need to be something even more fundamental than built-in dictionaries, wireless content delivery, and other such bells and whistles. What will be needed above all — and what the printed book so well embodies — is a stable platform. Indeed, when was the last time one of your printed books was “upgraded” out of existence?

Books, NOW!

Ted Striphas — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:08:37 +0000

Via Filed By and my good friend José Afonso Furtado’s Twitter Feed comes this fascinating Publishers Weekly story about Perseus Book Group and its BIG EXPERIMENT at BookExpo America 2009. The crux of the matter is this: Perseus plans on publishing a 144-page book consisting of “sequels” to some of literature’s great opening lines — all within the span of 48 hours.

The title of the work — Book: The Sequel — clearly isn’t just about the content. It’s as much if not more about the publishing industry and how it operates (or could operate), which is to say nothing of the existential crisis its main product — the book — finds itself in today. What we have in Book: The Sequel is more than just print-on-demand, it’s essentially books, now!

I’m usually fairly circumspect of experiments like these. Rarely are they particularly well thought through, and often they put far too much faith in simple, technological solutions or outcomes. Not here. Perseus proposes a remarkably holistic picture of what book publishing could be in the not-so-distant future — or later this week, if you want to get all “the future is now” about it.

First, the substance: crowdsourced content. There already have been experiments in collaborative book writing, so in a sense what Perseus is doing is not altogether new. Those who wish to contribute to the volume can log on to www.bookthesequel.com, where they can can pitch their own opening line sequels. On the other hand, the Press’ experiment in crowdsourcing demonstrates one possible future function publishers may choose to take on. That is, they may opt to become aggregators of decentralized information, as opposed to their simply remaining the gatekeepers of already centalized or unified information. Perseus also plans on focus-grouping the cover designs using similar means, which is in keeping with my previous post on the marketing power of a site like Scribd.

Next, the product, which is multiple. Perseus plans on releasing digital, audio, and online versions of Book: The Sequel, as well as a tangible, print-on-paper volume. This is impressive. Too often experiments in flash publishing result in only one of these — usually the e-edition and nothing more. The looming test of the book industry’s mettle will be in how well it works — quickly and elegantly — across both analog and digital platforms.

Finally, the opportunities for post-publication interactivity. Thus far publishing has done a fairly good job in recognizing the growing importance of author-audience interaction. It has built ample infrastructure to support this. But what the industry hasn’t caught on to well enough yet is the importance of decentralizing its social networks. Online book marketing has been preoccupied with bringing audiences back again and again to the publishers’ or the authors’ websites. This is understandable. But we live in a time when conversations about culture happen all over the place, and increasingly on Facebook and Twitter. It’s a testament to Perseus’ vision that it’s recognized how it need not try to control or consolidate the conversation about its book for that conversation to occur.

My only misgiving — and it is a significant one — about Book: The Sequel is that there appears to be no structure in place to compensate those who’ve donated their labor to create the book’s content. This will have to change, even if it ultimately results in micro-payments to the authors (which, as Chris Anderson has shown, can add up in the long run). Any book publishing business model that relies on crowdsourced content but that does not compensate the crowd for its initiative, wisdom, and goodwill surely will be unsustainable.

That said, Perseus plans on donating the profits of its grand experiment to the National Book Foundation. Who could have any truck with that?

We Interrupt This Broadcast…

Ted Striphas — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:10:48 +0000

I’d been planning on posting installment three of my “What the Publishing Industry Can Learn” series, on Netflix. I’ve decided to postpone it until later in the week, however, given the thoughtful responses over on Conversational Reading and The Reading Experience to installment one, on The Da Vinci Code.

I argued that the publishing industry might take some inspiration from books like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and media guru Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, both of which contain short chapters, as a way of helping people to fit reading better into their everyday lives.

Neither Conversational Reading nor The Reading Experience was particularly moved by my argument. Despite my caveats to the contrary, both insisted that I fell back on the “people have waning attention spans” refrain that too often gets trotted out in conversations about the alleged decline of book reading. I must not have been clear enough in my reasoning.

If we assume, as many do, that book reading is on the decline, then there are at least two ways of approaching the issue.

Option one is to imagine that people have been seduced by electronic media — lulled by television, the internet, Twitter, video games, and more into a state in which they are pathologically unable to focus and, by extension, incapable of following a book-length narrative from beginning to end.

Option two is to recognize the numerous “environmental” factors that make it extremely difficult for people to find sustained time for book reading in their everyday lives. Hence the examples from my earlier post, of leaf blowers, crying babies, etc.

Option one places all of the responsibility for not reading squarely on people’s shoulders and opens them (us?) up to moral condemnation. Why don’t people read much anymore? Because they’re obviously damaged by the electronic media!

Option two, on the other hand, is driven by a different set of entailments. Instead of disposing us to pathologize people for not reading books, it asks us to consider what, precisely, gets in the way of reading. The assumption behind option two is that people do indeed want to read but that specific aspects of their everyday lives simply get in the way.

Clearly I prefer option two, and that’s what I had in mind in my post on The Da Vinci Code. People’s attention spans aren’t waning — or, at least, they’re not simply doing so. Instead, a host of environmental factors militates against our picking up books and sitting down with them for long, ponderous hours.

There’s a lovely example in The Late Age of Print (the book) that might illustrate what I’m getting at. In the chapter on Oprah, I discuss the surprising number of people who admitted on The Oprah Winfrey Show to reading books at stoplights while driving alone in their cars.

What can this banal example tell us? First, it shows us just how hungry people are to read. You must be desperate to do so if you break out a book for however long you’re forced to wait until the traffic light turns green. Second, it suggests that people don’t read more books in part because of the myriad everyday activities that, cumulatively, cause our free time to evaporate. Most of the stoplight readers happened to be en route to picking up children, for instance, or in the midst of running the types of errands that sustain the workaday world (grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning, etc.)

Do these people have pathologically short attention spans? No. Is their attention divided? Absolutely. So why not begin writing books that would fit better into the world of option two? Might it not follow that people would begin consuming more books?

The other glaring issue here, of course, is economic class. Not everyone is sufficiently enfranchised to read for a protracted amount of time; doing so takes time, which costs money. The length of the average workday/week in the United States has risen steadily over the last 25 years, while real wages have fallen. Today we work longer for less.

Under these conditions, publishers and writers have a choice. Either they foment revolution and thereby free people to work shorter hours and to read more, or they adapt to the changing temporal and economic contexts within which people live.

Given the degree to which book publishing has become a bona fide capitalist enterprise, the choice seems pretty clear to me.