I’m about the enter the final week of my undergraduate “Cultures of Books and Reading” class here at Indiana University.  I’ll be sad to see it go.  Not only has the group been excellent this semester, but I’ve learned so much about how my students are negotiating this protracted and profound moment of transition in the book world — what I like to call, following J. David Bolter, “the late age of print.”

One of the things that struck me early on in the class was the extent to which my students seemed to have embraced the notion that they’re “digital natives.”  This is the idea that people born after, say, 1985 or so grew up in a world consisting primarily of digital media.  They are, as such, more comfortable and even savvy with it than so-called “digital immigrants” — analog frumps like me who’ve had to wrestle with the transition to digital and who do not, therefore, fundamentally understand it.

It didn’t occur to me until last Wednesday that I hadn’t heard mention of the term “digital natives” in the class for weeks.  What prompted the revelation was a student-led facilitation on Robert Darnton’s 2009 essay from the New York Review of Books, on the Google book scanning project.

We’d spent the previous two classes weighing the merits of Kevin Kelly’s effusions about digital books and Sven Birkerts‘ poo-pooings of them.  In Darnton we had a piece not only about the virtues and vices of book digitization, but also one that offered a sobering glimpse into the potential political-economic and cultural fallout had the infamous Google book settlement been approved earlier this year.  It’s a measured piece, in other words, and deeply cognizant of the ways in which books, however defined, move through and inhabit people’s worlds.

In this it seemed to connect with the bookish experiences of my group purported digital natives, whose remarks confounded any claims that theirs was a generationally specific, or unified, experience with media.

Here’s a sampling from the discussion (and hat’s off to the facilitation group for prompting such an enlightening one!):

One student mentioned a print-on-paper children’s book her mother had handed down to her.  My student’s mother had inscribed it when she herself was seven or eight years old, and had asked her daughter to add her own inscription when she’d reached the same age.  My student intends to pass the book on one day to her own children so that they, too, may add their own inscriptions.  The heirloom paper book clearly is still alive and well, at least in the eyes of one digital native.

Another student talked about how she purchases paper copies of the the e-books she most enjoys reading on her Barnes & Noble Nook.  I didn’t get the chance to ask if these paper copies were physical trophies or if she actually read them, but in any case it’s intriguing to think about how the digital may feed into the analog, and vice-versa.

Other students complained about the amount of digitized reading their professors assign, stating that they’re less likely to read for class when the material is not on paper.  Others chimed in here, mentioning that they’ll read as much as their prepaid print quotas at the campus computer labs allow, and then after that they’re basically done.  (Incidentally, faculty and students using Indiana University’s computer labs printed about 25 million — yes, million – pages during the 2010-2011 academic year.)

On a related note, a couple of students talked about how they use Google Books to avoid buying expensive course texts.  Interestingly, they noted, 109 pages of one of the books I assign in “The Cultures of Books and Reading” happen to appear there.  The implication was that they’d read what was cheap and convenient to access, but nothing more.  (Grimace.)

Finally, I was intrigued by one of the remarks from my student who, at the beginning of the term, had asked me about the acceptability of purchasing course texts for his Kindle.  He discussed the challenges he’s faced in making the transition from print to digital during his tenure as a college student.  He noted how much work it’s taken him to migrate from one book form (and all the ancillary material it generates) to the other.  Maybe he’s a digital native, maybe he isn’t; the point is, he lives in a world that’s still significantly analog, a world that compels him to engage in sometimes fraught negotiations with whatever media he’s using.

All this in a class of 33 students!  Based on this admittedly limited sample, I feel as if the idea of “digital natives” doesn’t get us very far.  It smooths over too many differences.  It also lets people who embrace the idea off the hook too easily, analytically speaking, for it relieves them of the responsibility of accounting for the extent to which print and other “old” media still affect the daily lives of people, young or old.

Maybe it’ll be different for the next generation.  For now, though, it seems as if we all are, to greater and lesser degrees, digital immigrants.

OR, HOW TO SAVE INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORES ONE E-BOOK AT A TIME

Several weeks ago I mentioned the “Cultures of Books and Reading” class I’m teaching this semester at Indiana University.  It’s been a blast so far.  My students have had so many provocative things to say about the present and future of book culture.  More than anything, I’m amazed at the extent to which many of them seem to be book lovers, however book may be defined these days.

Right now I’m about midstream grading their second papers.  I structured the assignment in the form of a debate, asking each student to stake out and defend a position on this statement: “Physical bookstores are neither relevant nor necessary in the age of Amazon.com, and U.S. book culture is better off without them.”  In case you’re wondering, there’s been an almost equal balance between “pro” and “con” thus far.

One recurrent theme I’ve been seeing concerns how independent booksellers have almost no presence in the realm of e-readers and e-reading.  Really, it’s an oligarchy.  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and to a lesser extent, Apple have an almost exclusive lock on the commercial e-book market in the United States.  And in this sense, my students have reminded me, the handwriting is basically on the wall for the Indies.  Unless they get their act together — soon — they’re liable to end up frozen out of probably the most important book market to have emerged since the paperback revolution of the 1950s and 60s.

Thus far the strategy of the Indies seems to be, ignore e-books, and they’ll go away.  But these booksellers have it backward.  The “e” isn’t apt to disappear in this scenario, but the Indies are.  How, then, can independent booksellers hope to get a toehold in the world of e-reading?

The first thing they need to do is, paradoxically, to cease acting independently.  Years ago the Indies banded together to launch the e-commerce site, IndieBound, which is basically a collective portal through which individual booksellers can market their stock of physical books online.  I can’t say the actual sales model is the best, but the spirit of cooperation is outstanding.  Companies like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple are too well capitalized for any one independent store to realistically compete.  Together, though, the Indies have a fighting chance.

Second, the Indies need to exploit a vulnerability in the dominant e-book platforms; they then need to build and market a device of their own accordingly.  So listen up, Indies — here’s your exploit, for which I won’t even charge you a consulting fee: Amazon, B&N, and Apple all use proprietary e-book formats.  Every Kindle, Nook, and iBook is basically tethered to its respective corporate custodian, whose long-term survival is a precondition of the continuing existence of one’s e-library.  Were Barnes & Noble ever to go under, for example, then poof! – one’s Nook library essentially vanishes, or at least it ceases to be as functional as it once was due to the discontinuation of software updates, bug fixes, new content, etc.

What the Indies need to do, then, is to create an open e-book system, one that’s feature rich and, more importantly, platform agnostic.  Indeed, one of the great virtues of printed books is their platform agnosticism.  The bound, paper book isn’t tied to any one publisher, printer, or bookseller.  In the event that one or more happens to go under, the format — and thus the content — still endures.  That’s another advantage the Indies have over the e-book oligarchs, by the way: there are many of them.  The survival of any e-book platform they may produce thus wouldn’t depend on the well being of any one independent bookseller but rather on that of the broader institution of independent bookselling.

How do you make it work, financially?  The IndieBound model, whereby shoppers who want to buy printed books are funneled to a local member bookshop, won’t work very well, I suspect.  Local doesn’t make much sense in the world of e-commerce, much less in the world of e-books.  It doesn’t really matter “where” online you buy a digital good, since really it just comes to you from a remote server anyway.  So here’s an alternative: allow independent booksellers to buy shares in, say, IndieRead, or maybe Ind-ē.  Sales of all e-books are centralized and profits get distributed based on the proportion of any given shop’s buy-in.

There you have it.  Will the Indies run with it?  Or will all of the students enrolled in my next  “Cultures of Books and Reading” class conclude that independent bookselling has become irrelevant indeed?

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s been awfully quiet around here for the past six weeks or so.  I’ve had a busy summer filled with travel, academic writing projects, and quality time with my young son.  Blogging, regretfully, ended up falling by the wayside.

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

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

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

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

My favorite podcast, The Critical Lede, just reviewed my recent piece appearing in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.”  Check out the broadcast here — and thanks to the show’s great hosts, Benjamin Myers and Desiree Rowe of the University of South Carolina Upstate.

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.

I’ve just published a short essay called “E-books — No Friends of Free Expression” in the National Communication Association’s online magazine, Communication Currents. It was commissioned in anticipation of National Freedom of Speech Week, which will be recognized in the United States from October 18th to 24th, 2010. Here’s a short excerpt from the piece, in case you’re interested:

It may seem odd to suggest that reading has something to do with freedom of expression. It’s one thing to read a book, after all, but a different matter to write one. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that reading is an expressive activity in its own right, resulting in notes, dog-eared pages, highlights, and other forms of communicative fallout. Even more to the point, as Georgetown Law Professor Julie E. Cohen observes, “Freedom of speech is an empty guarantee unless one has something—anything—to say…[T]he 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 is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression, because it forms a basis upon which our future communications are built. Anything that impinges upon our ability to read freely is liable to short-circuit this connection.

I then go on to explore the surveillance activities that are quite common among commercially available e-readers; I also question how the erosion of private reading may affect not only what we choose to read but also what we may then choose to say.

The Comm Currents piece is actually a precis of a much longer essay of mine just out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3) (September 2010), pp. 297 – 317, as part of a special issue on rights. The title is “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.” Here’s the abstract:

This paper 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 to free expression.

Keywords: Kindle; Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Reading; Privacy

Feel free to email me if you’d like a copy of “The Abuses of Literacy.” I’d be happy to share one with you.

The title of the journal article, incidentally, pays homage to Richard Hoggart’s famous book The Uses of Literacy, which is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the field of cultural studies. It’s less well known that he also published a follow-up piece many years later called “The Abuses of Literacy,” which, as it turns out, he’d intended to be the title of Uses before the publisher insisted on a change.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the work. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

First, a few of updates.  I just finished a draft of a new preface for The Late Age of Print, which will be appearing in the (drum roll please!) NEW PAPERBACK EDITION due out in January, 2011.  The piece develops and extends some of the ideas from one of my favorite blog entries, “Books: An ‘Outdated Technology?’” which I posted to this site last September.  More good news about the paperback edition: Columbia University Press has decided to price it at just $18.50.  That’s a bargain as far as I’m concerned — at least, by academic book standards.

Now onto the business at hand: the Kindle smackdown.  A colleague of mine is considering buying an Amazon Kindle e-reader and posted a query to her Facebook site inviting friends to weigh in.  One of her respondents linked to a series of YouTube videos called “The Book vs. The Kindle,” which was produced by the good folks at San Francisco’s Green Apple Books — one of my favorite bookstores in the world.  From the moment I watched one of the videos (which happened to be installment five), I knew I’d have to share it here with you:

Cute theme, eh? Paper books, it seems, are good for picking up your fellow literati in bookstores. E-books?  Not so much.  Who would have thought print and paper were so hot?

The video actually reminded me quite a bit of an article appearing in the March 31, 2010 edition of The New York Times, which had this to say about the conundrums of owing an e-reader: “Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach.  That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form.”

It’s intriguing, indeed, to hear just how “all-in” some publishers have become for e-books, now that there are some seemingly viable platforms floating around out there.  I just wonder if they’ve paused long enough to consider how the technology they’re so investing in may be thwarting one of the most prosaic ways in which the book industry goes about hocking its wares.