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!?

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple months now.  An article of mine, which may be of interest to readers of The Late Age of Print, was published in the October 2009 issue of the journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication (CSMC).  Here’s the citation, abstract, and keywords:

Ted Striphas, “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum: Contested Copies in an Age of Intellectual Property,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 26(4) (October 2009): 1-17.

This essay begins by investigating how and on what basis the boundary between originals and copies gets drawn within the framework of intellectual property law. It does so by exploring Harry Potter-related doubles that were featured in the 2000 trademark and copyright infringement case, Scholastic, Inc., J. K. Rowling, and Time Warner Entertainment Company, L.P. v. Nancy Stouffer. The paper then moves on to consider how, within the context of the case, the boundary line dividing “originals” from “copies” grows increasingly indeterminate, so much so that it becomes untenable to speak of either category at all. It thus investigates what happens when the figure of the simulacrum, which troubles bright-line distinctions between originals and copies, enters into the legal realm. Theoretically, the simulacrum would seem to pose a challenge to intellectual property law’s jurisprudential foundations, given how it blurs what should count as an “original” or a “derivative” work. This paper shows that while this may be true in principle, powerful multimedia companies like Scholastic, Time Warner, and others can strategically deploy simulacra to shore up their intellectual property rights.

Keywords: Harry Potter; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Trademark; Simulacrum

There’s a good deal of thematic overlap between the article and Chapter 5 of The Late Age of Print, which also focuses on Harry Potter and intellectual property rights.  They differ, though, in that the journal essay is more theoretically focused than the book chapter; the latter, I suppose, is more historical and sociological.

The strange thing about “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum” is that even though it’s quite theoretical, it’s also quite — I’m not sure what exactly — playful? comical? whimsical?  In any case, it’s probably the most fun piece that I’ve ever written and published.  I attribute that largely to the bizarre court case at the center of the essay, which I swear must have been plucked from the pages of a Lewis Carroll story.

In a perfect world I’d link to a PDF of the article, but the journal publisher, Taylor & Francis, prohibits it.  In an almost perfect world I’d link you to a post-print (i.e., the final word processing version that I submitted to CSMC), but even that I’m contractually barred from doing for 18 months from the time of publication.

Taylor & Francis charges $30 for the essay on its website, which to my mind is just ridiculous.  Heck, a yearly personal subscription to the journal costs $81!  So, if you’re university-affiliated and want to take a look at the piece, I’d encourage you to check with your own institution’s library.  If you’re not, I’m allowed to share a limited number of offprints with colleagues, and you can email me for one.

To complicate matters even more, the printed version of “Harry Potter and the Simulacrum” has the wrong copyright declaration.  I signed Taylor & Francis’ double-secret “license to publish” form instead of the usual copyright transfer.  Despite that, the piece still says © National Communication Association, which is the scholarly society under whose auspices CSMC is published.  Sigh.

Suddenly this is starting to sound like a Lewis Carroll story….

Thanks, everyone, for your patience during my few-weeks hiatus from The Late Age of Print blog.  My partner and I are thrilled to have had a child in early January.  Ever since then life has felt like something of a time warp.  I should have anticipated needing to take a short break from blogging, but I guess the hubris of first-time-parenting got the better of me.  In any case we’re all beginning to settle into something of a routine — to whatever extent you can call the first month of anyone’s life “routine.”  As I write this, our little guy is chilling in a bassinet right next to me.

I’m not exactly sure what the immediate future holds for this blog, beyond the fact that I intend to keep it up, running, and active.  I suspect that I’ll be making shorter (and hopefully more frequent) posts, but we’ll see.  In any case, please be sure to keep coming back; more content will indeed follow shortly.

Until then, don’t forget that you can download a PDF of the complete text The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control for free by clicking on the DOWNLOAD link at the top of the page.  Happy new year and enjoy.

I’ve been fortunate to have received some really excellent reviews of The Late Age of Print in its first year of publication.  Maybe even more exciting than all of this positive response has been the book’s inclusion on several top-ten of 2009 lists.  A couple of weeks ago Michael Lieberman over at Book Patrol (hosted on The Seattle Post-Intelligencer) included Late Age in his top-ten “books about books” of the year.  Last week Chapman/Chapman’s Ryan Chapman featured the book in his “Best Books of 2009″ post, calling it a “foundational text.”  And just yesterday Conversational Reading’s Scott Esposito gave the book a big shout by adding it to his “Favorite Reads of the Year” list.

So, with the end of 2009 almost in sight, I want to thank Michael, Ryan, Scott, and all of those who’ve supported the book this year, as well all of you readers out there who’ve been taking in, Tweeting about, and commenting on this blog.  I also want to acknowledge the hard work of José Afonso Furtado, a tremendous supporter of The Late Age of Print in all its forms, whose Twitter feed I piggy-back on.  Finally, I owe a heartfelt thanks to all the great folks at Columbia University Press and particularly my editor, Philip Leventhal, about whom I cannot say enough good things.

I realize that this post probably sounds as though I’m signing off for the year.  Don’t worry, I’m not.  I’ll be back again in 2009 with more dispatches from the late age of print.

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.

I just came across this image by David Silver, who is a professor and leading cyberculture researcher based at the University of San Francisco.  On September 13, 2009, he snapped this picture of the window display of Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts, a bookstore in Berkeley, California.

The Late Age of Print @ Mrs. Dalloway's

What’s that you see there, just right of center?  Why, it’s The Late Age of Print, of course! What a thrill to see it there!  I’ll have to follow up with David for some back-story.  For now, I can tell you that I initially stumbled across the image when a Google search led me to David’s Flikr stream.

Thanks, David — and my gratitude goes out to Mrs. Dalloway’s for not only carrying but indeed featuring the book.  If those of you reading this blog happen to see The Late Age of Print in a bookstore, library, or anywhere else in public, snap a photo, send it to me (striphas@thelateageofprint.org), and I’ll post it here.

Unlike bestselling writers, academic authors rarely get sent out on book tours.  From time to time, however, we do have the good fortune of getting invited to speak to audiences in various parts of the country about our work.  Case in point: I just returned from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I delivered the convocation address for the Campus Honors Program (CHP).  This was the first in a series of speaking engagements that, so far, will take me to Iowa, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania.  A few more and I may print up a t-shirt.

The event at U of I was a blast.  It began in the office of Professor Bruce Michelson, the director of the CHP.  We chatted one-on-one for about an hour about literary history, the future of the book, religious publishing in the United States, and a host of other engaging topics.  From there we adjourned to the Illini Union.  I delivered my speech entitled “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read” — which focuses on electronic reading, liberal political culture, and privacy rights — to a lively group of about 60 undergraduate honor students.  They peppered me with incisive questions about my stance on copyright, the future of public libraries in an age of ubiquitous bookselling, the implementation of a “right to read,” digital dossiers, and more.  The group kept me on my toes, to be sure.

The title slide from my presentation, "The Abuses of Literacy"

The evening concluded with a lovely “meet the author” reception at Professor Michelson’s house.  The CHP students had been given copies of The Late Age of Print over the summer, and so they came prepared ready to discuss Harry Potter, Oprah, the future of printed books, and even some material well beyond the scope of the book, including what I thought about online learning.  What an edifying discussion it was — for me!  The most memorable question?  “What would I say to Oprah if I ever had the chance to meet her?”  My favorite moment?  When multiple students told me that they had found Late Age to be accessible and intellectually engaging — my use of the word “incunabula” notwithstanding.

Before the CHPers headed home for the night, they lined up for an impromptu book signing.  Though I’ve inscribed a few books here and there, this was my first (and maybe my only) official book signing.  It really made me feel special.  Indeed, I was overwhelmed to see so many copies of Late Age – more than I’d ever seen gathered in any one place.  And what made me feel even more special was the knowledge that the books had been placed in the hands of incredibly bright people who’d closely read and carefully considered what I had to say.  What more could an author hope for?

I’ve been working practically nonstop for the last several weeks on the remarks for all of my upcoming speaking engagements.  Needless to say, I haven’t been as attentive to The Late Age of Print blog as I would like to be.  So, to tide you over until I can compose something substantive of my own, I thought I’d share a brief excerpt of Richard Nash’s AMAZING review of my book, which appeared a week or so ago in The Critical Flame:

It is impossible to talk about books, nowadays; to talk about books without nostalgia creeping into the discourse; though perhaps, to speak the lingo, perhaps ‘twas always so. Whether the specific tone is wistful, elegiac, defensive, hostile, or whether the talk is of an imminent and lamented end, or of a bitter and defiant survival, or of some type of triumphalist victory in another world, it is difficult to find a discussion of books that does not view the past as some better place. The title alone of the book under discussion, The Late Age of Print, offers all sorts of elegiac vapors — instantly retrospective, placing the present almost immediately in the past, it frames the now from the vantage point of a future from which we can gaze back upon the current times.

Like Benjamin’s Angel of History in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the book gazes upon the past, its back to the future towards which the storm, emanating from the catastrophe of the past, hurls it.

I call Nash’s review “amazing” not only because he genuinely understands and praises the book (let’s be honest…that of course never hurts), but also because of what he has added to my own understanding of the book industry — above and beyond whatever I may have said in Late Age. And that is exactly what book criticism should do: it should engage a text in meaningful dialogue and thus further a conversation already in progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spent the last week vacationing in Paris.  The trip was excellent in itself, but a felicitous discovery along the way made it even better.  A wrong turn while searching for the Pompidou Centre landed my travel companion and I at the Village Voice Bookshop, one of Paris’ best English-language bookstores. Here I am, standing outside the store on the Rue Princesse:

There, while thumbing through the nicely-stocked “Books On Books” section, I was thrilled to discover a copy of…The Late Age of Print!

Thereafter I proceeded to have a lovely conversation with the founder and owner of the Village Voice Bookshop, Odile Hellier, who gave me a crash course in Parisian book culture.  According to Hellier there’s been something of a falloff in bookselling and reading in Paris in recent years, which makes it all the more challenging for English-language shops like hers, whose inventories are not underwritten by the French government, to make ends meet.

That’s all the more reason why I’m thankful not only to have seen The Late Age of Print at the Village Voice but also to have had some good friends purchase the copy while I was there.