Recent
Jul. 11-15, 2011 | Association for Cultural Studies Summer Institute, University of Ghent, Belgium
Mar. 18, 2011 | American Cultures in the Digital Age Conference, Vanderbilt University
Mar. 25, 2010 | Cooper Lecture Series, Swarthmore College
Feb. 22, 2010 | Information Society Program, University of Illinois
Oct. 30, 2009 | Scholarly Communication Committee, Georgetown University
Oct. 22, 2009 | Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
Oct. 11, 2009 | Honors Convocation, University of Illinois
Last week I blogged about the proliferation of book rental programs, particularly those focused on college students and their textbooks. I raised questions about their promises of savings over traditional purchase and buyback, and asked whether most college students ever truly bought their textbooks, anyway. But there’s more at stake in book renting — beyond [...]
I’ve been struck this start of the school year by the proliferation of textbook rental outfits here in Bloomington, Indiana and elsewhere. Locally there’s TXTBookRental Bloomington, which brokers exclusively in rented course texts, as well as TIS and the IU Bookstore (operated by Barnes & Noble), both of whom sell books in addition to offering [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
After more than a decade of dominance fueled by aggressive expansion, the leading big-box bookstore chains in the United States are hurting. Borders is barely hanging on by a financial thread, with an almost $38 million loss near the end of 2009 sending the company into a tailspin. 2010 began with a round of layoffs, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
By now most of you reading this blog probably know about the latest dust-up over ebook prices. For those of you who haven’t been following the news, here’s a brief synopsis followed by some thoughts on the history of book pricing. A couple of weeks ago officials at Macmillan, one of the largest global book [...]
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 [...]
Courtesy of José Afonso Furtado’s Twitter feed comes a blog post by PersonaNonData (PND) called, “Book Insurance.” Don’t let the snoozer of a title turn you off. It’s an offbeat but nonetheless thought-provoking piece on the future of electronic reading. And it’s a future in which you better make sure your coverage is up to [...]
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