November 30th, 2009 — The Future of Publishing
The philosopher Gilles Deleuze once mentioned an “eight year black hole” in his career, in which his publishing dwindled to almost nothing. Lately I’ve been feeling as though this blog has been sucked into the same black hole, since I haven’t posted anything in over a month. Sorry. Teaching and a host of other responsibilities have kept me from my running commentary on the past, present, and future of book culture. I’m back now, and hoping to sustain a pretty good push through the winter holidays.
Today I’m writing about Oprah. On Friday, November 19th, Winfrey announced that she’ll be pulling the plug on her daytime talk show in 2011, after 25 years on the air. You can read more about the details of the announcement here, in the New York Times.
Honestly, I’m a little surprised that this struck people as news. In 2006, I believe, Winfrey said that 2010-2011 would be the last season for Oprah. In any case, the real news — and what most likely prompted the public reminder of the talk show’s impending end — was Winfrey’s decision to launch a cable TV channel bearing her name. As if “Oxygen” wasn’t enough!
The cable channel got me thinking about a point that I raise in the conclusion to The Late Age of Print. There I examine how Winfrey seems to have inverted the usual strategy of branding. It used to be that products were branded as a means by which to differentiate them from other, similar products in the marketplace. No so with Oprah, who’s spawned TV shows, magazines, films, websites — indeed, a sprawling array of media and non-media products. As I observe in the conclusion, it’s not that Oprah products are branded; it’s more apt to say that the Oprah brand is “producted.”
The announcement of the cable TV channel’s launch made we wonder if I’d actually taken the analysis far enough. I’m tempted now to say that the Oprah label isn’t merely a brand. It performs far work than this. If you’ll forgive a momentary lapse into geek-speak, it may well be that Oprah is a platform upon which to build things, including “hardware” (i.e., media infrastructure and institutions), “operating systems” (i.e., the milieu or “culture” of those institutions), and “software” (i.e., the content or programming to fill those institutions).
The announcement of the cable TV channel also made me wonder what else Winfrey may have in store for us once The Oprah Winfrey Show has wrapped. For my purposes, I’m most interested in the fate of the Book Club, which has been hosted on the talk show since 1996. I seriously doubt that Winfrey will abandon books come 2011, given how much notoriety her bibliophilia has brought her. But perhaps, rather than simply recommending books, she’ll venture into publishing them herself. Isn’t that the next logical step? After all, people already routinely refer to the books she recommends as “Oprah books.” Who’s paying the actual publishers any mind — other than, of course, other publishers?
For more than a decade Winfrey has been the darling of the book publishing industry. In the coming age of the Oprah platform, what would it mean for the established publishers suddenly to become her…competitors?
May 17th, 2009 — Scandal!
Sorry about the unanticipated hiatus. The usual end of the semester crunch, well, crunched a couple of weeks ago. After that, I was working on some administrative stuff, the details of which probably would bore you. Suffice it to say that I’m back in blogging action, and happy to be here.
My friend Colleen alerted me to this Time magazine article, which riffs off of a piece published a few days earlier in Vanity Fair: “James Frey Gets a Bright, Shiny Apology from Oprah.” The title pretty much tells you all you need to know. Talk show host Oprah Winfrey said two little words — “I’m sorry” — to author James Frey, three years after flambeeing him publicly on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
Some quick back story, for those of you who may have missed it. In September 2005, Winfrey selected Frey’s harrowing memoir of drug addiction and recovery, A Million Little Pieces, for Oprah’s Book Club. Sales immediately spiked, as they always do when Winfrey gives a book her seal of approval. There was just one little problem with A Million Little Pieces: it was a fabrication, or at least partly so, as The Smoking Gun reported in early January, 2006. Winfrey initially defended the book and its author, but eventually she made an about-face. She invited Frey back onto Oprah along with his editor, Nan Talese, and confronted the author about his having lied.
“Confronted” may be too tepid a word. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I get embarrassed for people who totally go down in flames on TV. That’s pretty much how I felt on January 26, 2006, as I watched Winfrey rake Frey over the coals for 60 excruciating minutes.
When author Jonathan Franzen dissed Oprah back in the fall of 2002, after Winfrey had selected his wonderful novel, The Corrections, for the book club, she just canceled his invitation to the show and that was the end of it. When asked years later about the whole Franzen brouhaha, Winfrey replied by saying that Franzen “was not even a blip on the radar screen of my life.” Ouch.
But Frey, it seems, is the blip who doesn’t ever quite disappear from Winfrey’s radar screen. Why is she only now beginning to let go of Frey and his mendacity?
There’s something profoundly anthropological about the Frey controversy. It is as if Frey’s lies fundamentally breached the book club’s cosmic order. To repair the damage, high priestess Winfrey needed to sacrifice or cast out the offending party, which of course she did. Homeostasis only would be restored in the community years later, after Frey was redeemed through a kind of purification ritual. Okay, so it was in Vanity Fair, but you get the point. (Would that he appeared for a third time on The Oprah Winfrey Show!)
What all this suggests to me is that Oprah Winfrey hasn’t just produced a talk show, a book club, a magazine, or even a brand name. Around her there has arisen a unique system of valuation, a distinctive array of artifacts, and a discernible set of practices and social identifications. In other words, what she’s produced is a bona fide culture.
The term “cultural producer” often is used to describe pretty much anyone who makes stuff — which is to say, it’s an awfully overapplied term in the age of blogs, YouTube, and more. What the whole Frey fiasco shows us is that Wifrey is one of the few entities who genuinely deserves the name.
March 2nd, 2009 — What Publishing Can Learn From...
I’d been planning on posting installment three of my “What the Publishing Industry Can Learn” series, on Netflix. I’ve decided to postpone it until later in the week, however, given the thoughtful responses over on Conversational Reading and The Reading Experience to installment one, on The Da Vinci Code.
I argued that the publishing industry might take some inspiration from books like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and media guru Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, both of which contain short chapters, as a way of helping people to fit reading better into their everyday lives.
Neither Conversational Reading nor The Reading Experience was particularly moved by my argument. Despite my caveats to the contrary, both insisted that I fell back on the “people have waning attention spans” refrain that too often gets trotted out in conversations about the alleged decline of book reading. I must not have been clear enough in my reasoning.
If we assume, as many do, that book reading is on the decline, then there are at least two ways of approaching the issue.
Option one is to imagine that people have been seduced by electronic media — lulled by television, the internet, Twitter, video games, and more into a state in which they are pathologically unable to focus and, by extension, incapable of following a book-length narrative from beginning to end.
Option two is to recognize the numerous “environmental” factors that make it extremely difficult for people to find sustained time for book reading in their everyday lives. Hence the examples from my earlier post, of leaf blowers, crying babies, etc.
Option one places all of the responsibility for not reading squarely on people’s shoulders and opens them (us?) up to moral condemnation. Why don’t people read much anymore? Because they’re obviously damaged by the electronic media!
Option two, on the other hand, is driven by a different set of entailments. Instead of disposing us to pathologize people for not reading books, it asks us to consider what, precisely, gets in the way of reading. The assumption behind option two is that people do indeed want to read but that specific aspects of their everyday lives simply get in the way.
Clearly I prefer option two, and that’s what I had in mind in my post on The Da Vinci Code. People’s attention spans aren’t waning — or, at least, they’re not simply doing so. Instead, a host of environmental factors militates against our picking up books and sitting down with them for long, ponderous hours.
There’s a lovely example in The Late Age of Print (the book) that might illustrate what I’m getting at. In the chapter on Oprah, I discuss the surprising number of people who admitted on The Oprah Winfrey Show to reading books at stoplights while driving alone in their cars.
What can this banal example tell us? First, it shows us just how hungry people are to read. You must be desperate to do so if you break out a book for however long you’re forced to wait until the traffic light turns green. Second, it suggests that people don’t read more books in part because of the myriad everyday activities that, cumulatively, cause our free time to evaporate. Most of the stoplight readers happened to be en route to picking up children, for instance, or in the midst of running the types of errands that sustain the workaday world (grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning, etc.)
Do these people have pathologically short attention spans? No. Is their attention divided? Absolutely. So why not begin writing books that would fit better into the world of option two? Might it not follow that people would begin consuming more books?
The other glaring issue here, of course, is economic class. Not everyone is sufficiently enfranchised to read for a protracted amount of time; doing so takes time, which costs money. The length of the average workday/week in the United States has risen steadily over the last 25 years, while real wages have fallen. Today we work longer for less.
Under these conditions, publishers and writers have a choice. Either they foment revolution and thereby free people to work shorter hours and to read more, or they adapt to the changing temporal and economic contexts within which people live.
Given the degree to which book publishing has become a bona fide capitalist enterprise, the choice seems pretty clear to me.
February 24th, 2009 — What Publishing Can Learn From...
This is the second installment in a multi-part series reflecting on how the publishing industry might connect better with readers. You can read part I, on The Da Vinci Code, by clicking here.
II. What can the publishing industry learn from Oprah?
I can hear you groaning already. “Oprah? Really?” Yes, really. “Hasn’t that already been done to death?” No. In fact, there’s an awful lot left to say about Oprah and books.
I won’t get into the debate over whether Oprah’s killing (or has already killed) literature. I deal with that issue at length in The Late Age of Print, the book, and so I’ll leave that strand of the argument for there. Instead, I want to reflect here on what Oprah might tell us about the teaching of literature on the one hand, and about the form of books on the other.
Over the years I’ve pored over dozens of transcripts from The Oprah Winfrey Show — mostly those featuring Oprah’s Book Club. What’s impressed me time and again is how willing Oprah and her producers seem to be to meet readers — and, indeed, non-readers — wherever they are educationally and to usher them into the world of letters.
For example, one episode I looked at featured Oprah traipsing around a big-box bookstore, commenting on all the different books and amenities. I wish she’d also visited an independent bookstore or a public library, but even so the visit was telling. Most people — but especially English teachers — presume that literary instruction begins, well, in the literary classroom, with literary concerns. But what Oprah shows us is that there’s a prior element missing from most formal literary instruction, namely, dedicated lessons in where and how best to acquire books. In fact, I received an email from Oprah’s Book Club just the other day giving me tips on how to shop for books in a recession. Used books and second-hand bookstores figured prominently. Did your literature teachers ever consider offering advice like this?
Those who are already well ensconced in the world of letters easily forget how intimidating their world can be for outsiders looking in. If you want to excite people about books and reading, take the time to show them in, and don’t belittle them for not already knowing the way.
My second vignette happened last October, when Oprah decided to endorse Amazon.com’s e-reader, Kindle. She effused about its portability and ease of use, and delighted in the speed with which she could acquire e-titles wirelessly. No big surprises there; that’s pretty much the standard story with Kindle. What did surprise me, however, was the utter exuberance one of the device’s more seemingly banal features seemed to inspire in Oprah and her studio audience. That feature was Kindle’s built-in dictionary.
Their exuberance ought to be telling us something. And that “something” is all about people’s implicit dissatisfaction with the form of print-on-paper books. We live in a time of rising expectations in terms of ease of access to information. If I’m trolling the web and encounter a word I don’t know, I can have multiple, highly-reliable definitions delivered to me within seconds. But if I’m reading a paper book and run across, say, “sybarite,” I have to stop reading, get up, walk across the room, and hope my dictionary contains the entry. So why don’t publishers begin including glossaries and other such readerly amenities in their books as standard features, to save people the trouble?
Maybe this suggestion sounds far-fetched. Yet it’s no more far-fetched than breaking books up into chapters, or including tables of contents, page numbers, indexes, and so forth. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that the “standard” formal attributes of books haven’t always existed. Every last one of them had to be invented, and each was invented in response to historically specific needs. (Check out some of the images of early printed books in Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy to see what I mean.) Perhaps it’s time, then, to revisit the form of the printed book and to re-engineer it for a 21st century media context.
Who knew a television talk show host could tell us so much about a medium that’s supposedly being killed by…television?
