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 the possibility of manipulation by advertising, or even the mutation of a business model.  There are broader social, economic, and attitudinal considerations that arise when people like you and me cease being the owners of books and instead become their lessees.

The last time book renting really caught on was during the Great Depression of the 1930s.  I’ve blogged about this before; it’s how the now-defunct Waldenbooks chain got its start.  What’s interesting to me is the context out of which book rental first emerged: a severe economic crisis — a time when the gap between rich and poor became a chasm, and disposable income all but dried up for ordinary people.  While I don’t believe the present-day renewal of interest in book renting is reducible to the economic meltdown of 2008 (and beyond), I cannot help but be struck by the similarity in the timing.

Indeed, in the United States, we’ve been hearing report after report about how the income of the wealthiest Americans — a tiny minority — has been growing, while that of the majority has been slipping.  Right now the wealthiest 20% of the population controls a whopping 84% of the nation’s wealth.  In crude terms, we’re moving in the direction of a society consisting of “haves” and the “have-nots,” or, more to the point, of people who can afford to own property (broadly construed) and those who cannot.

Now, I don’t mean to deny the benefits that come from book renting.  Realistically, most people don’t want to own every book they read, and for good reason.  Not all books are keepers; they’re also heavy and consume valuable space — the paper ones, anyway.  Beyond that, when books become too expensive for people to own outright, it’s good to have some type of affordable option (in addition to libraries) to keep people reading. Rental may be something of a boon from an environmental standpoint, finally, because you can produce fewer goods and consume fewer resources in the process.

But there’s also a major downside.

Renting books, as with rental more broadly, means you no longer get to set the terms of your relationship with these goods.  Can you underline, highlight, or annotate a book you’ve rented?  What about dog-earing important pages?  Legally speaking, can you loan a rented book to a friend?  Can you duplicate any of the pages, assuming they’re for personal use?  In a traditional ownership situation, you’re the one who provides the answers to these questions.  You’re in control.  When you lease, the answers are dictated by the property owner, or rentier, who naturally puts her or his interests ahead of yours.

Renting is, then, a type of power relationship in which the rentier holds all of the cards — or, at least, the really goods ones.  And here I’m reminded of a passage from the cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams, who, in his magnificent essay “Culture Is Ordinary” (1958), talks about how the coming of power and consumer goods to the impoverished Welsh countryside transformed people’s senses of themselves.  The ability to own consumer goods, Williams said, heightened the “personal grasp” his friends and family felt over their lives.  The presence of these items and their ability to use them however they saw fit made them less beholden to wealthy, outside authorities.

Today, the tide seems to be shifting the opposite way.  Economic conditions are such that rental is becoming a more attractive option again — and not only for books.  And with it slips that sense of personal grasp Williams talked about.  Often, signing a lease is an exercise in having to accept terms and conditions someone else has laid out for you.  More disturbingly, doing so over and over again may well reinforce an attitude of deference and resignation among we, the lessees.

With apologies to Hayek, renting books could be a pathway leading us down the road to serfdom.

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 rental options.  The latter also just launched a marketing campaign designed to grow the rental market.  Further away there’s Amazon.com, which isn’t only offering “traditional” textbook rentals but also time-limited Kindle books.  These are “pay only for the exact time you need” editions that disappear once the lease expires.

There’s been a good deal of enthusiasm about textbook rentals.  Many see them as a welcome work-around to the problem of over-inflated textbook prices, about which many people, including me, have been complaining for years.  Rentals help to keep the price of textbooks comparatively low by allowing students the option of not having to invest fully, in perpetuity, in the object.  Indeed, the rental option recognizes that students often share an ephemeral relationship with their course texts.  Why bother buying something outright when you need it for maybe three or four months at most?

My question is: are textbook rentals simply a boon for college students, or are there broader economic implications that might complicate — or even undercut — this story?

I want to begin by thinking about what it means to “rent” a textbook, since, arguably, students have been doing so for a long time.  When I was an undergraduate back in the early 1990s, I purchased books at the start of the semester knowing I’d sell many of them back to the bookstore upon completion of the term.  Had I bought these books, or was I renting them?  Legally it was the former, but effectively, I believe, it was the latter.  I’d paid not for a thing per se but for a relationship with a property that returned to the seller/owner once a period of time had elapsed.  That sounds a lot like rental to me.

So let’s assume for the moment that the rental of textbooks isn’t a new phenomenon but rather something that’s been going on for decades.  What’s the difference between then and now?  Buyback.  Under the old rental system you’d get some money for your books if your decided you didn’t want to keep them.  Under the new régime you get absolutely nothing.  Granted, it wasn’t uncommon for bookstores to give you a pittance if you decided to sell back your course texts; more often than not they’d then go on re-sell the books for a premium, adding insult to injury.  Nevertheless, at least you’d get something like your security deposit back once the lease had expired.  Now the landlord pockets everything.

Some industrious student needs to look into the economics of these new textbook rental schemes.  Is it cheaper to rent a course text for a semester, or do students actually make out better in the long run if they purchase and then sell back?

If I had to speculate, I’d say that booksellers wouldn’t be glomming on to the latest rental trend if it wasn’t first and foremost in their economic self-interest — even if they’re representing it otherwise.

Coming next week: textbook rentals, part II: what happens when books cease being objects that ordinary people own and accumulate?

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.

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.

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, followed by restructuring and most recently the departure of its CFO, Mark Bierley. The cracks are beginning to show in its retail stores, too. Here in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, the bookshelves at our local Borders are getting emptier by the month. It’s also now closed on Sunday, presumably as a way to cut operating costs.

Barnes & Noble seems to be faring better, but that’s a relative statement these days. For the better part of a year now it’s been fighting a takeover attempt led by billionaire corporate raider, Ron Burkle. But in some ways that’s not the worst of its worries. In an attempt to counter Burkle, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio recently went looking for someone else — someone friendlier — to buy the company. He was met with this grim response by the financial press:

Before news of Barnes & Noble’s plan to explore alternatives, shares had declined about a third this year in the face of concerns that the growing digital-books market and competition from Amazon.com Inc. would squeeze out its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores while also leaving it with little market share in the digital world, where its Nook e-book reader followed in the footsteps of Amazon’s Kindle.

“It’s difficult to envision a buyer of this company given the structural issues it continues to face,” said Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter.

Realistically, it’s probably an overstatement to say that nobody would want to buy Barnes & Noble. Someone with an interest in revamping the chain might well want to do so. Of course that would most likely mean, sayonara Barnes & Noble as we know it.

This isn’t a surprising development, and both Borders and Barnes & Noble should have seen it coming.

Remember Tower Records? Or all of those Virgin Mega-Stores? With the rise of digital music, most of the big-box music stores were forced to shut their doors. They just couldn’t compete with a business model premised on minimizing infrastructure and abandoning material goods. The same goes for Blockbuster and all of those other national video store chains, whose physical stores have been driven under by the double-whammy of Netflix and video on-demand.

E-books still have limited uptake, of course, which means that Borders and Barnes & Noble have yet to feel the digital squeeze to the degree that music and video stores have. Still, their lackluster forays into online bookselling have put both companies at a major disadvantage. Barnes & Noble used to have a fallback in the education market, with an exclusive lock on hundreds of college bookstores across the United States. Even that’s now being eroded by Amazon.com, however, which is actively courting students on its website.

There’s been some talk lately of how to retool the big-box bookstores to make them more competitive. Unfortunately, as a recent Publishers Weekly article noted, one plan would significantly involve “Taking the ‘Book’ Out of Bookstores.” In place of the physical volumes there would be an increase in what booksellers like to call “non-book product,” including journals, cards, fancy writing paper, reading lights, games, and that type of thing.

No doubt the profit margins on non-book product are attractive, and I suspect they help to create store traffic. But honestly, is this a viable long-term strategy? Does it make sense to save these bookstores by turning them into plus-sized stationery stores?

Here’s a different idea. Bowker, a leading book industry research and information firm, recently reported that women over the age of 40 comprise the largest segment of the US book buying market. Common sense would dictate that Borders and Barnes & Noble ought to pursue that aspect of the market even more actively than they do now, since that’s where the money is.

But it’s clear that now’s not the time for common sense; now’s the time for bold, unconventional thinking. What this means is that the bookstore chains ought to be courting those who aren’t your usual book buyers and working closely with publishers to develop titles that would appeal to them. That way they’d be broadening the market rather than simply reproducing it as it is.

I also wonder if now might be the right time to begin experimenting with smaller, shopping mall-based stores as well. Borders and Barnes & Noble closed most of their Waldenbooks and B. Dalton mall locations in the 1990s, in part to help finance the construction of their superstores. Nevertheless, people still love to shop at the mall, even in the internet age. The experience of being in pubic, hanging out, and poking around is something that online retailers can never hope to duplicate. And so here, again, is another untapped possibility. A suitable print-on-demand system could make mall stores even more attractive to book buyers, moreover, since then they wouldn’t have to wait for titles to be delivered from suppliers or sources online.

Maybe, in the end, it’s time to bid farewell to the big-box bookstore chains. Personally, though, I’d be sad to see them go, especially since they’ve been instrumental in making books available in places where, for the most part, they weren’t abundant — places like my hometown of Goshen, New York, for instance. I also think it’s important for printed books to remain a part of the experiential landscape of people’s everyday lives, both in the form of libraries and retail stores.

Indeed, what would it mean to live in a time when we couldn’t pluck a random volume off of a shelf and start reading, just for the sake of doing so? That’s the question we’re staring at now, not only because of the shakeout that’s been going on for the better part of 15 years in the retail sector, but also because of the cutbacks that are crippling US public libraries. But Instead of staring at this question, isn’t it about time folks started staring it down?

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.

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.

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 publishing firms, decided to put the screws to Amazon.com.  For over two years now the retailer has insisted that $9.99 is the decisive threshold at which consumers will begin trading reading material composed of atoms for stuff made of bits.  Reportedly it’s managed to sell three million Kindles and who-knows-how-many e-books, but still Macmillan begs to differ on the matter of pricing.  Management there believes that a more flexible scale would be preferable to Amazon’s flat-rate, with new e-titles starting at $15 and older works listing for around $6.

Well, Amazon got so miffed by Macmillan’s proposal that it temporarily suspended sales of any new books published under its imprimatur, which includes such venerable labels as Farrar, Straus & Giroux; St. Martins Press; Henry Holt; Tor Books; and others.  Macmillan responded by calling Amazon’s bluff, knowing full-well that Amazon’s decision to de-list the publisher’s capacious catalog ultimately would hurt the retailer’s bottom line more than it would help its cause of ebook pricing.  With the door now open, other presses are jumping on the higher-priced ebook bandwagon.

This is a fraught issue, to be sure.  As a frequent book buyer, I’m grateful to Amazon for doing its part to keep ebook prices low for as long as it could.  The company clearly understands the psychology behind the pricing of digital goods.  Consumers intuitively grasp that the marginal costs of producing any given copy of an ebook is next to nil, and so we’re understandably reluctant to buy up e-titles and expensive hardware when paper books can be had for a comparable enough price.  On the other hand, I recognize that the promise of advances and royalties gives professional authors incentive to continue producing new work.  Accordingly, they have a compelling interest in maximizing their return through healthy (read: inflated) prices.

We could go around and around all day about who’s right and who’s wrong here.  As someone whose paycheck comes primarily from my work as a university professor and only secondarily from my publications, selfishly, I’m inclined to side with Amazon.com.  But really there are no clear-cut good guys and bad guys here.  The whole situation reminds me of a recent dispute between physicians at my local hospital and a major health care provider, each of whom accused the other of excessive greed and bullying.  In the end, the only party who suffered was the people who, for the duration of the quarrel, had to drive 50 miles to get the health care to which they were entitled.

Anyway, this may well be the first major conflict over the price tag for ebooks, but it’s surely not the first time the book industry has gone to war over book prices.  This has happened at least a couple of times before, first in the late 19th century and then again in the 1920s/30s.  In both instances, a bunch of young, brash publishers decided to slash their prices as a strategy to gain market share.  Older, more established firms responded by digging in their heels and waging a clever PR campaign designed to convince the public that it was in their best interest to pay more than they actually needed to for books.  (You can read more about this history in chapter 1 of The Late Age of Print and in volume III of John Tebbel’s magisterial A History of Book Publishing in the United States.)

What might these earlier price wars tell us about the present situation?  Anyone looking to establish themselves as leaders in digital publishing would do well to undersell their competitors by offering electronic editions at or below the $9.99 price-point.  The goal should be to sell as many copies as possible, by finding a price so attractive that no one can resist.  It’s funny: we hear all the time about how book reading is on the decline in the United States and elsewhere.  Could it be that the falloff is attributable not only to the usual scapegoats (electronic media, waning attention spans, etc.) but also and significantly to publishers’ greediness over book pricing, electronic or otherwise?

Indeed, if history teaches us anything, then it teaches us that publishers who’ve made their mark selling low can succeed in the long run.  Just ask Simon & Schuster and Farrar & Rinehart (yes, that’s the same Farrar of Macmillan’s Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux).  They were among the upstarts of the 1920s and 30s whose decision to sell books for a buck sent the old-timers into a tizzy.

Ringing any bells, Macmillan?

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.

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 scratch.

PND opens by noting the book industry’s accelerating journey down the path of digital rights management (DRM) — this despite the recording industry’s growing realization that locking down content may not be the best long term survival plan.  She or he then goes on to discuss a significant problem stemming from publishing’s recent turn to DRM.  The latter not only forestalls illicit file-sharing, but it also “places limits on interoperability.”

So while I may have legally purchased Toni Morrison’s Beloved for my Amazon Kindle, there’s no hope of my ever reading it on whatever e-reader I may have purchased in the past or may one day purchase in the future — short of my hacking the e-book, of course, which is illegal under 1998′s Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

PND poses a novel solution to the problem of interoperability.  She/he suggests creating an ancillary or derivative market for e-book insurance.  That way you can pay to cover yourself and your library should you ever decide that it’s time to switch e-reading platforms, or in the event that the model you’ve purchased gets discontinued.

It’s as brilliant an idea as it is chilling.

It’s enough that the marginal costs of producing e-books are next to nothing.  But now imagine adding on, say, a few cents per title — maybe more, as you can never anticipate just how deep the greed runs — to make sure that your content remains accessible to you in perpetuity.  Essentially you’d be paying for the privilege of retaining access to what is already yours.  Sadly, I suspect that many and perhaps most e-book readers would accept this type of arrangement, since micro-payments are astonishingly easy to swallow.  What’s a few pennies here or there?

The costs of the physical hardware notwithstanding, the benefit of e-books is that they are cheap (at least in theory).  But that’s now.  You can be sure that down the road, the business-savvy book industry or perhaps some outside entrepreneur will figure out some creative way to gouge e-book prices — book insurance or otherwise.