A short piece I wrote for the journal Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) has just been published.  It’s called “Performing Scholarly Communication,” and it’s included in a special section on “The Performative Possibilities of New Media” edited by the wonderful Desireé Rowe and Benjamin Myers.  The section includes contributions by Michael LeVan and Marcyrose Chvasta, Jonathan M. Gray, and Craig-Gingrich Philbrook, along with an introduction by and a formal contribution from Desireé and Ben.  You can peruse the complete contents here.

My essay is a companion to another short piece I published (and blogged about) last year called “The Visible College.”  “The Visible College” focuses on how journal publications hide much of the labor that goes into their production.  It then goes on to make a case for how we might re-engineer academic serials to better account for that work.  “Performing Scholarly Communication” reflects on one specific publishing experiment I’ve run over on my project site, The Differences and Repetitions Wiki, in which I basically opened the door for anyone to co-write an essay with me.  Both pieces also talk about the history of scholarly journal publishing at some length, mostly in an effort to think through where our present-day journal publishing practices, or performances, come from.  One issue I keep coming back to here is scarcity, or rather how scholars, journal editors, and publishers operate today as if the material relations of journal production typical of the 18th and 19th centuries still straightforwardly applied.

I’ve mentioned before that Desireé and Ben host a wonderful weekly podcast called the The Critical Lede.  Last week’s show focused on the TPQ forum and gathered together all of the contributors to discuss it.  I draw attention to this not only because I really admire Desireé and Ben’s podcast but also because it fulfills an important scholarly function as well.  You may not know this, but the publisher of TPQ, Taylor & Francis, routinely “embargoes” work published in this and many other of its journals.  The embargo stipulates that authors are barred from making any version of their work available on a public website for 18 months from the date of publication.  I’d be less concerned about this stipulation if more libraries and institutions had access to TPQ and journals like it, but alas, they do not.  In other words, if you cannot access TPQ, at least you can get a flavor of the research published in the forum by listening to me and my fellow contributors dish about it over on The Critical Lede.

I should add that the Taylor & Francis publication embargo hit close to home for me.  Almost a year and a half ago I posted a draft of “Performing Scholarly Communication” to The Differences and Repetitions Wiki and invited people to comment on it.  The response was amazing, and the work improved significantly as a result of the feedback I received there.  The problem is, I had to “disappear” the draft or pre-print version once my piece was accepted for publication in TPQ.  You can still read the commentary, which T&F does not own, but that’s almost like reading marginalia absent the text to which the notes refer!

Here’s the good news, though: if you’d like a copy of “Performing Scholarly Communication” for professional purposes, you can email me to request a free PDF copy.  And with that let me say that I do indeed appreciate how Taylor & Francis does support this type of limited distribution of one’s work, even as I wish the company would do much better in terms of supporting open access to scholarly research.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged here about a short essay I’d written, “E-books: No Friends of Free Expression,” and about a longer academic journal article on which it was based called, “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.”  Well, since then I’ve had a bunch of people writing in asking for copies of the article, and even more asking me about the “right to read.”

Here’s what I know about the latter.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea first appeared in a 1994 law review article by Jessica Litman called “The Exclusive Right to Read.”  It was picked up, extended, and given significant legal grounding by Julie E. Cohen in her 1996 (master)piece, “The Right to Read Anonymously.”  Then, in 1997, free software guru Richard Stallman dramatized the idea in a pithy little parable called — you guessed it — “The Right to Read.”

The American Library Association proposed something like a “right to read” back in 1953, when it issued its first “Freedom to Read Statement.”  (The statement has since been updated, most recently in 2004, although it remains relatively quiet on the subject of 3G- and wifi-enabled e-readers.)  Meanwhile, the Reading Rights Coalition, an advocacy organization, was formed in 2009 after the Author’s Guild claimed the Kindle 2′s text-to-speech function violated its members’ audiobook rights — a claim that understandably didn’t sit well with the 30 million Americans with “print disabilities.”  Finally, librarian Alycia Sellie and technologist Matthew Goins developed a “Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books,” which concludes with the important provision that reader information ought to remain private.

I’m sure there’s lots that I’ve missed and would welcome any further information you may have about the right to read.  For now, I hope you’re enjoying National Freedom of Speech Week, and don’t forget that reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression.

You may remember back in March my announcing that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I’d negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book’s presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd’s mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I’m beginning to feel less comfortable with the book’s presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky — things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there’s one new feature I’m not feeling: ads by Google. Here’s a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I’m not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it’s what subsidizes the cost of my own and others’ “free” experience.

Here’s the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I’m pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It’s not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 “reads” of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I’ve always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others — hopefully many others — go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I’m more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a “commercial” or “non-commercial” use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it’s built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered “non-commercial?” What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of “non-commercial” once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don’t have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, “no.” Then again, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with an issue that’s never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I’ll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

I will say, though, that I recently ported one of my wiki projects, Differences and Repetitions, from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I’m not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

My latest essay, “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing,” is now out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(1) (March 2010), pp. 3-25.  In my opinion, it’s probably the single most important journal essay I’ve published to date.  Here’s the abstract:

This essay explores the changing context of academic journal publishing and cultural studies’ envelopment within it. It does so by exploring five major trends affecting scholarly communication today: alienation, proliferation, consolidation, pricing, and digitization. More specifically, it investigates how recent changes in the political economy of academic journal publishing have impinged on cultural studies’ capacity to transmit the knowledge it produces, thereby dampening the field’s political potential. It also reflects on how cultural studies’ alienation from the conditions of its production has resulted in the field’s growing involvement with interests that are at odds with its political proclivities.

Keywords: Cultural Studies; Journal Publishing; Copyright; Open Access; Scholarly Communication

I’m fortunate to have already had the published essay reviewed by Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe, who podcast over at The Critical Lede. You can listen to their thoughtful commentary on “Acknowledged Goods” by clicking here — and be sure to check out their other podcasts while you’re at it!

Since I’m on the topic of the politics of academic knowledge, I’d be remiss not to mention Siva Vaidhyanathan’s amazing piece from the 2009 NEA Almanac of Higher Education, which recently came to my attention courtesy of Michael Zimmer.  It’s called “The Googlization of Universities.”  I found Siva’s s discussion of bibliometrics — the measurement of bibliographic citations and journal impact — to be particularly intriguing.  I wasn’t aware that Google’s PageRank system essentially took its cue from that particular corner of the mathematical universe.  The piece also got me thinking more about the idea of “algorithmic culture,” which I’ve blogged about here from time to time and that I hope to expand upon in an essay.

Please shoot me an email if you’d like a copy of “Acknowledged Goods.”  Of course, I’d be welcome any feedback you may have about the piece, either here or elsewhere.

This one’s for all of my readers in the Northeast, especially those in and around the Philadelphia area.  I’ll be delivering a public lecture at Swarthmore College on Thursday, March 25th at 4:00 p.m.  The location is the Scheuer Room in Kohlberg Hall.  The event, which is part of the College’s Cooper Lecture Series, is free and open to the public.  Please come if you can.

The title of my presentation is “Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read: Privacy and Property in the Late Age of Print.”  Here’s an abstract for the talk, which is more up-to-date than the version you’ll find on the Swarthmore website:

This presentation focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader’s two-way communications capabilities on the one hand, and on its parent company’s recent forays into data services on the other.  I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends.  Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right of free expression.

The presentation is an opening gambit of sorts for a new book project I’m working on, called The Right to Read.

Anyway,  I’d be delighted to see you at Swarthmore on Thursday.  Please introduce yourself to me if you come.  And if you bring your copy of The Late Age of Print, I’d be happy to autograph it for you.

Great news!  A good Samaritan, whose handle is “creiercret,” recently uploaded the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print onto the document sharing site, Scribd.  Here’s the link to the PDF if you’re interested in checking it out.  The book has already had more than 100 views on the site, I’m pleased to report.

Late Age has been accessible for free online for almost a year, so why am I so excited to see it appear now on Scribd?  Mainly because the site just added new sharing features, making it easy to send content to iPhones, Nooks, Kindles, and just about every other major e-reader you can imagine.  In other words, The Late Age of Print’s mobility-quotient just increased significantly.

I may have some more exciting, mobility-related news about the book, which hopefully I’ll be able to share with you in the next week or so.  I’ll keep you posted.  Until then, be sure to check out The Late Age of Print on Scribd, and why don’t you go ahead shoot a copy off to your favorite e-reader while you’re at it!?

On February 10, 2010, a German court began what may well be the start of the book industry equivalent of the dismantling of Napster.

Earlier that month, six global publishing firms — John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, Reed Elsevier, Cengage Learning, and Pearson — filed suit against RapidShare, seeking an injunction against and damages from the file-sharing service for having violated the publishers’ copyrights.  At the center of the suit were 148 e-books that the publishers alleged had been uploaded to the site and subsequently distributed without compensation to the rights holders.  RapidShare, they claimed, had become a pirate vessel teeming with all sorts of illegal e-book booty.

The question I want to raise here is this: does it make sense at this particular juncture for book publishing to go the way of the music industry in chasing down websites that facilitate digital piracy?

I began pondering this question last week as I drove from Indiana to the University of Illinois, where I delivered a lecture at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science.  The extended car travel gave me the chance to listen to the audiobook of Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which I’d downloaded gratis shortly after the book’s release last July.

I was deeply intrigued by Anderson’s discussion of Microsoft’s anti-piracy strategy in China, where the illegal trade in the company’s products reportedly runs rampant.  In the 1990s, Microsoft took a hard line against Chines software pirates — publicly, at least.  Behind the scenes, however, company executives secretly understood that while software piracy may hurt them financially in the short-term, it had the positive effect of locking the Chinese market into its proprietary platform over the long-term.  With China’s growing economic prosperity, Anderson reports, more and more people there have begun purchasing legitimate Microsoft products.  “Piracy created dependency and helped lower the cost of adoption when it mattered.”  In other words, it was piracy that significantly helped seed the ground for Microsoft’s present dominance in China.

Now, it seems to me that there’s a similar case to be made for e-book piracy.  A little over a year ago, the Guardian’s Bobbie Johnson offered a pro-piracy argument for e-books, suggesting that publishers will only move into the digital realm in earnest once they realize there’s sufficient piracy going on there.  Until they discover they need to control the e-book market, Johnson argues, there’s little incentive for them — and by extension, readers — to make the shift.

While I’m persuaded by Johnson’s thesis in principle, he doesn’t take it far enough.  I’ve already commented on his amnesia about printed book piracy, which over the years has fueled many e-book initiatives.  Now I realize there’s something else going on here, too.  Johnson claims that the music industry embraced digital downloading only after pirates dragged the industry kicking and screaming in that direction.  And where music publishing goes, says Johnson, so too book publishing must go.

The problem with this claim stems from the rather different material histories of sound recording and book publishing.  Wax cylinders, forty-fives, LPs, eight-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, mini discs, digital audio tapes: the fact is that music formats have changed significantly — indeed, regularly — over the last 50 or 100 years. Music lovers have long understood that “music” is not equivalent to “format.”  Even before the introduction of digital music downloads, listeners were well disposed to format change.

The same isn’t true for books.  With the exception of relatively minor disturbances — chapbooks and paperbacks come most immediately to mind — bibliographic form hasn’t changed all that much since the introduction of the codex.  The result is that book readers are much less inclined to embrace format change, compared to their music-loving counterparts.  And this inertia is, in part, what has held up widespread e-book adoption.

All that brings us back to RapidShare.  What the presses who sued RapidShare don’t seem to understand is that if e-books do indeed represent the future of publishing, then you need to provide readers with significant incentive to embrace the change.  That’s exactly what RapidShare and other file-trading sites have been doing: educating would-be e-book consumers in the virtues of digital reading.

It isn’t stealing.  It’s pirate pedagogy.

I’ve been meaning to weigh in here on Barnes & Noble’s recent announcement about its new e-reader, Nook.  It seems to be getting talked about everywhere, including this NPR story that I heard a few days ago.  My bottom line is that, while I have not yet tried the device (it won’t be released until the end of November, just in time for the holidays), I am more optimistic about it and its capabilities compared to the Amazon Kindle.

It would be easy enough to point to Nook’s feature-ladenness as the reason behind my optimism.  If nothing else it’s got a color screen, which sets it apart from that of Kindle.  I’ve described the latter’s inexplicably well-touted e-ink display as reminiscent of an Etch-a-Sketch, although I’m also taken with Nicholson Baker’s description of it in the New Yorker: “[T]he screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray.”  Nook also has touch screen capabilities; Kindle does not.  While I’m not a proponent of touch simply for its own sake, I recognize tactility as a key experiential dimension of the handling of printed books.  The touch screen thus makes for some nice experiential “carry-over” from the one (analog) reading platform to the other (digital).

But it’s not all about the interface.  More important to me are Nook’s sharing functions and its — bear with me on this one — lack of a backup feature.  The sharing function is straightforward enough: the device lets your friends borrow your e-titles for up to two weeks.  Here’s what the Barnes & Noble website says:

You can share Nook to Nook, but it doesn’t stop there. Using the new Barnes & Noble LendMe™ technology… you will be able to lend to and from any iPhone™, iPod touch, BlackBerry, PC, or Mac, with the free Barnes and Noble eReader software downloaded on it.

Now, what the site neglects to mention is that publishers can opt-out of making their Nook books circulable.  Nevertheless, I appreciate that even a limited type of sharing is the default position for the device and its content.  Too much DRM does not a happy customer base make.

My delight at the lack of a backup feature clearly requires some explaining.  One of the chief selling points of the Amazon Kindle is its so-called “backup” feature.  I say “so called” because its not only about user-friendly content protection.  The backup occurs on the Amazon server cloud, where intimate details about what, where, how, and for how long you read get archived, presumably forever.  That’s great if your Kindle gets stolen or crashes, but it does open up all sorts of privacy concerns that I’ve been addressing lately in lectures at the University of Illinois, the University of Iowa, and tomorrow at Georgetown University.

All that to say, it pleases me that Barnes & Noble isn’t following Amazon into the cloud.  Indeed its decision not to go there, it seems to me, is indicative of the company’s sense of its own identity.  However much Barnes & Noble may venture into other areas, such as printed book publishing and e-book readers, at the end of the day it still recognizes itself for what it’s always been: a bookseller.  Amazon, on the other hand, presents itself as though it were a retailer, but in reality it is, in the words of CEO Jeff Bezos, “a technology company at its core.” (Advertising Age, June 1, 2005).  The two company’s respective — indeed, quite divergent — approaches to client e-reader data reflect these differences in their core missions.

I may yet pre-order a Nook to go along with my Kindle.  I’m still on the fence, but I’m leaning towards giving it a try.  I’ll keep you posted, but until them I’d be interested in hearing how others are weighing in.

My blogging has fallen off seriously in the last few weeks.  This is due mainly to my finishing up an essay I’ve been working on called “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.”  Well, it’s done now (at least a solid draft of it), and so I’m back to posting on The Late Age of Print. And in the spirit of the essay, I thought I’d say a few words about the “right to read.”

It’s an idea that, as far as I can tell, was introduced back in 1994 by law professor Jessica Litman, who published an essay in the Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal called “The Exclusive Right to Read.”  Her piece was followed three years later by another one, a story by free software pioneer Richard Stallman, called “The Right to Read.”  Law professor Julie Cohen gave the concept its fullest treatment in “The Right to Read Anonymously,” a marvelous work that she published in 1996 in the Connecticut Law Review.

The crux of the argument, articulated most clearly by Cohen, is this: “the content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.”  Reading thus is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression; the one simply cannot exist without the other.

I’m rather taken with the idea of a right to read given the ways in which new e-book systems, such as the Amazon Kindle, tether reading to corporate custodians who in turn mine the machines for intimate details about how people read.  As these devices become more prevalent, I worry about the effects they might have on how people practice and conceive of reading.  Until now it was relatively difficult to monitor closely how and what people read.  What will become of reading, and people’s relationship to it, once that freedom is definitively diminished?  Indeed, a right to read seems to me of paramount importance in a context where someone is looking over your shoulder every time that you open an electronic book or periodical.

This of course begs the more difficult question, how should a right to read be implemented?  Cohen’s work is brilliant in that it locates a right to read quite convincingly in the penumbra of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, deriving it from existing case law.  The trouble with this approach, though, comes from the current mood of the U.S. court system.  Jeffrey Toobin’s recent piece in the New Yorker, on the legal backlash against “judicial activism,” suggests that the courts as a whole — and the Supreme Court in particular — are for the most part unwilling to expand rights in precisely the way that Cohen is calling for.

So perhaps a right to read could be established legislatively — maybe even as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.  I like this approach in theory, but cannot imagine how it would ever happen in practice.  After all, we’re talking about a Congress that passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act unanimously.  This is also a Congress that listens closely to cultural producers such as Disney and lobbying groups like the MPAA, who in all likelihood would oppose a right to read on the grounds that it would force them to give up some measure of control over their intellectual properties (to which I would respond, “exactly!”).

Is there a third way?  I sure hope so, and I suspect if there were it would have to begin at the grassroots.  I’m thinking here of something like a counterpart to the Creative Commons, a nonprofit that gives cultural producers licensing options beyond the more traditional — and traditionally restrictive — terms of copyright.  Would it be possible to begin architecting legal and digital rights similarly — that is, to allow people to read anonymously or at least under their own terms?

This is the question I’m left with having completed my piece on the Kindle, and indeed I believe it’s urgent that we respond to it.  It’s a question that, if I’m right, the future of liberal societies may well hinge on.

My inner distribution nerd was thrilled to discover (via José Afonso Furtado) Michael Carins’ recent reflections on the death of the international standard book number, or ISBN, over on his blog PersonaNondata.  The argument goes something like this.  Over the last several years there has been a noticeable movement away from the ISBN, particularly in the case of e-books.  Leading the way has been Amazon.com, which refuses to assign ISBNs to any of the Kindle books it sells.  With book digitization there has also tended to follow dis-aggregation, or the chopping up of books into smaller, component parts that can be sold separately.  How do you assign a single ISBN to what’s fast becoming an exploding whole?

Cairns clearly knows his stuff.  As a former President of Bowker, he was chin-deep in the trenches of the recent effort to rework the ISBN for the 21st century.  The result was the shift from a 10-digit to a 13-digit standard, which went into effect on January 1, 2007.  My question is this: is the ISBN still necessary?

Anyone who’s read The Late Age of Print will know that I do not ask this question lightly. I devote the better part of Chapter 3 to the ISBN’s history, and to tell you the truth, in the process of doing the research I developed something of a crush on this smart little product code.  Personally I’d be sad to see it go.  But as an historian of technology it seems clear that the ISBN has just about exhausted its usefulness.

It’s important to bear in mind what computing and online communications looked like when the ISBN was first conceived, back in the late 1960s.  Processing power was paltry by today’s standards.  Broadband was barely an inkling of an idea.  The ISBN was developed within the context of these technological constraints, as a concise and thus highly efficient way in which to convey extremely detailed information about the language, publisher, title, and edition of any given book.

Today computers are capable of processing much more complex data strings, which need not be limited to numerals or the occasional letter X.  Furthermore, broadband has resulted in much faster electronic communications and consequently obviates the need to “keep it simple” and to the point (Twitter notwithstanding).  In other words, the constraints under which the ISBN was created hardly apply today.

The ISBN was designed not only to facilitate “back-office” communications about books.  It was also designed to facilitate their distribution.  And in this respect Amazon’s move away from the ISBN with its Kindle editions is telling.  Time and again the company has shown that it, and only it, wants to control the distribution of Kindle books.  Indeed they are digitally rights managed so as to forestall their circulation beyond anyone besides the reader/customer/end-user/licensee (I’m not entirely sure what to call this person anymore).  Amazon is moving us away from an era of more or less unfettered book circulation, and its slow abandonment of the ISBN is a manifestation of this.

It’s also worth remembering that the ISBN grew up at a time when the book industry showed perhaps its sharpest division of labor.  There were authors, agents publishers, typesetters, printers, binders, distributors, booksellers, and certainly a whole host others all working in concert in disparate places on a single product.  Now consider Amazon. With Kindle the company effectively becomes an extension of the publisher, typesetter, printer, and binder, all while acting as book distributor and seller.  If Amazon has its way then we are likely to see a further breakdown in the book industry’s division of labor.  What’s the point of an industry Esperanto when centralization is fast becoming the order of the day?

Incidentally, this is precisely why the answer to my question, “Is the ISBN still necessary?” is still a “yes,” despite all that I have had to say about historical contexts and the like.  The ISBN was more than just a product code.  It was an accomplishment — a testament to an industry’s ability to achieve unity despite the pressures of competition, corporatization, and globalization.  Disturbingly, the waning of the ISBN signals the opposite trend: the growing hegemony of a single player who holds disproportionate sway over the industry as a whole.