The Late Age of Print » late age of print

Kindle Smackdown

Ted Striphas — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 11:59:54 +0000

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 The piece develops and extends some of the ideas from one of my favorite blog entries, “Books: An ‘Outdated Technology?’”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.

Update: one possible exception to the “no more covers” rule for e-readers may be something like the dual-display Toshiba Libretto W100, although with this particular device neither of the screens faces outward. Maybe a triple- or quad-screen e-reader will one day do the trick.

Where Credit Is Due

Ted Striphas — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:29:00 +0000

Wow! I’ve been blown away by the response to The Late Age of Print Open Source Audiobook Project, which I launched a couple of weeks ago now. The project got amazing buzz in its initial days, and generous volunteers have been editing the chapters to help produce a free, Creative Commons-licensed audio edition of my book. The end product is, as you know, a text-to-speech version, but there’s even some chance that a bona-fide, spoken-word audiobook might emerge at the end of all this. More on that anon.

For now, I need to publicly thank a bunch of folks without whom this project would have fizzled right from the start. For blogging about it I owe my gratitude to Burku Bakioglu, Ryan Chapman, Cory Doctorow, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Jason Jackson, Liz Losh, and Timothy Vollmer. For Tweeting, a tip of the hat goes out to Burku Bakioglu, Mark Bell, Ryan Chapman, Ron Charles, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, José Afonso Furtado, Jason Jackson, Henry Jenkins, Kembrew McLeod, Richard Nash, Howard Reinold, R. C. Richards, Brian Ruh, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Timothy Vollmer, in addition to a bunch of people whom I don’t know but who I understand kindly retweeted the news. I owe a special thanks to my publisher, Columbia University Press, and especially to my talented and amazingly-willing-to-go-there-with-me editor, Philip Leventhal. Finally, let me thank all of the extraordinary individuals who’ve already shared their time helping to prepare The Late Age of Print audiobook, as well as those who will do so in the future.

(A thousand pardons if I’ve accidentally left anyone off the list. Please email me if if your name should appear here. I was in touch with so many people the week I launched the audiobook project that it was easy to have lost track.)

The Late Age of Print OS Audiobook Project is still up and running, by the way, and continues to need your help. If you want to know more about what we need to do to make an audiobook out of the raw text of Late Age, scroll down to the next entry on this blog or click the link at the beginning of this paragraph. Either will tell you everything you need to know.

Remember: you don’t need to do much at all to help out the cause. Even a couple of minutes of your time, combined with that of lots of other contributors, will get this thing finished — and finished well — lickety-split. That’s the power of mass collaboration, and the wonder of wikis.

After this post it’s back to my regular commentary on the past, present, and future of books and book culture, although I may share some brief updates on the audiobook project from time to time. I’ve actually learned a great deal about collaborative audiobook production in the process of launching my little experiment, so you can expect to hear more about that soon.

The Late Age of Print Open Source Audiobook

Ted Striphas — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 11:29:34 +0000

I’ve been hinting for the last few weeks that I had a big announcement brewing. Well, at long last, here it is: together we’re going to make a free, Creative Commons-licensed audiobook of The Late Age of Print! First, some background on what inspired the project, and then a word or two on how you can help.

Listening to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a long car trip got me thinking: why not make an audiobook out of The Late Age of Print? And why not, like Anderson, give the digital recording away for free? The thought had barely crossed my mind when reality started to sink in. “You’re no Chris Anderson,” I told myself. “You don’t have the time or the resources to make an audiobook out of Late Age. Just forget about it.”

Well, I didn’t forget about it. I figured if I couldn’t make an audiobook myself, then I’d do the next best thing: let the computer do it for me, using a text-to-speech (T-T-S) synthesizer. The more I thought about the project, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea. It wouldn’t just be cool to be able to listen to Late Age on an iPod; an audio edition would finally make the book accessible to vision impaired people, too.

And so I got down to work. I extracted all of the text from the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age and proceeded to text-to-speech-ify it, one chapter at a time. I played back my first recording — the Introduction — but it was disaster! The raw text had all sorts of remnants from the original book layout (footnotes, page headers/numbers, words hyphenated due to line breaks, and whole lot more). They seriously messed up the recording, and so I knew they needed to go. I began combing through the text, only to discover that the cleanup would take me, working alone, many more hours than I could spare, especially with a newborn baby in my life. Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project for a second time.

Then it dawned on me: if I’m planning on giving away the audiobook for free, then why not get people who might be interested in hearing Late Age in on it, too? Thus was born the Late Age of Print wiki, the host site for The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project. The plan is for all of us, using the wiki, to create a Creative Commons-licensed text-to-speech version of the book, which will be available for free online.

There’s a good deal of work for us to do, but don’t be daunted! If you choose to donate a large chunk of your time to help out the cause, then that’s just super. But don’t forget that projects like this one also succeed when a large number of people invest tiny amounts of their time as well. Your five or ten minutes of editing, combined with the work of scores of other collaborators, will yield a top-notch product in the end. I’ve posted some guidelines on the wiki site to help get you started.

I doubt that I have a large enough network of my own to pull off this project, so if your blog, Tweet, contribute to listservs, or otherwise maintain a presence online, please, please, please spread the word!

Thank you in advance for your contributions, whatever they may be. In the meantime, if you have any questions about The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project, don’t hesitate to email me. I’d love to hear from you!

Easter Egg Hunt

Ted Striphas — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:37:34 +0000

It still may be one more day until THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, but what would Easter be (even if a day late) without an Easter egg? I’ve placed one somewhere on this blog. If you find it, then you’ll get to learn the news a full day before rest of the world.

Happy hunting!

Big Announcement Coming Soon!

Ted Striphas — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:32:10 +0000

I’ve mentioned a couple of times on this blog that I’ve got a big announcement in store for you. I’ve finally managed to secure all of the necessary okays, and so I’ll be rolling out the news on TUESDAY, APRIL 6th. Be sure to check back then…

Bound for Philly

Ted Striphas — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:12:49 +0000

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.

Going Mobile

Ted Striphas — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:56:07 +0000

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!?

Harry Potter and the Simulacrum

Ted Striphas — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:30:14 +0000

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….

Reboot

Ted Striphas — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:48:12 +0000

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.

Top-Ten

Ted Striphas — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:00:18 +0000

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.