The Late Age of Print The Late Age of Print C o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y P r e s s   |   n e w y o r k everyday book Culture from Consumerism to Control Ted Striphas Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex is 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 dened in this license specically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a prot by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprot or NGO. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Striphas, eodore G. e late age of print: everyday book culture from consumerism to control / Ted Striphas. p. cm. Includes bibliographic references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-14814-6 (alk. paper) 1. Book industries and trade—United States. 2. Books and reading—United States. 3. Publishers and publishing—United States. 5. Electronic publishing—United States. 6. Internet Bookstores—United States. I. Title. Z471.S85 2009 381’.45002-dc22 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. For Phaedra Acknowledgments ix Introduction: The Late Age of Print 1 Bottom Lines 6 Edges 9 Sites 13 1 E-Books and the Digital Future 19 A Book by Any Other Name 23 Shelf Life 26 Book Sneaks 31 Disappearing Digits 40 A Dierent Story to Tell 44 2 The Big-Box Bookstore Blues 47 Chain Reactions? 51 oroughly Modern Bookselling 56 ings to Do with Big-Box Bookstores 70 History’s Folds 77 Contents 3 Bringing Bookland Online 81 “e Tragedy of the Book Industry” 84 Encoding/Decoding—Sort of 91 A Political Economy of Commodity Codes 99 e Remarkable Unremarkable 107 4 Literature as Life on Oprah’s Book Club 111 O® 114 “No Dictionary Required” 117 “It’s More About Life” 125 A Million Little Corrections 130 An Intractable Alchemy 137 5 Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy 141 Securing Harry Potter 143 Pirating Potter 157 He-Who-Must-Be-Named 171 Conclusion: From Consumerism to Control 175 On the Verge 176 From Heyday to History and Beyond 187 Notes 191 Index 231 viii | contents Having taugHt Courses on the history and cultural politics of electronic media for the better part of a decade, in the fall of 2006 I decided to shi gears a bit. I designed a new undergraduate course called “e Cultures of Books and Reading,” hoping it would dovetail with a book—this book—I was working on at the time. As excited as I was about the subject matter, I couldn’t help but harbor some doubt. Would the class attract enough stu- dents to avoid preemptive cancellation by the university registrar? Aer all, experience had taught me that undergraduates, most of whom are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, would be enthusiastic to learn about cutting-edge digital media and would also have plenty to say about increas- ingly “old-fashioned” technologies, such as television. But would a class about book culture, oered not in a literature but in a communication department, spark their interest? Or would it seem too out of touch, too frumpy, too analog? Some days it’s easy to believe books won’t be around much longer. My worst fear, perhaps, was that something as mundane as a lack of interest in my class would simultaneously lend credence to this belief and eectively undercut a main argument I make here, namely, that reports announcing the death of books have been greatly exaggerated. As it turns out, I shouldn’t have second-guessed myself. To my surprise and delight, the course enrollment was one student shy of the maximum. e group was savvy about what’s been happening lately—and, in some cases, not so lately—in the book world. Many students professed to being avid book readers, well beyond what they were assigned. Some even n- ished a few pages of what seemed to be pleasure reading in the moments Acknowledgments before our class periods began. Granted, this course was an elective; the extent to which their knowledge and interests can be described as typical of their peers is thus dicult to judge. Even so, I should have known bet- ter than to assume my undergraduate students hadn’t found a meaningful place for books in their everyday lives. Like these students, many people have caused me to clarify my own assumptions about everyday book culture during the long process of con- ceiving, researching, writing, revising, and nally publishing this book. e list of those I wish to thank must begin with Lawrence Grossberg. Larry helped nurture this project from its inception, displaying his characteristic generosity of time, spirit, and intellect. I owe a profound debt to him, one I have no hope of repaying, except perhaps by mentoring my students as skillfully and patiently as he mentored me. I wish to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the following teachers who supported my research during my years as a graduate student in commu- nication studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Marcus Breen for helping me to nd my bearings as a media historian; Michael Hardt for his rigorous reading of Marxism and contemporary theory, which runs like a thread throughout this book; Vicky Johnson for rst prompting me to imagine how television relates to books; Della Pollock for consis- tently reminding me that good faith and good humor are key to making critical intellectual work engaging for all involved; and Jan Radway for demonstrating how to make cultural studies and book history harmonize. Collectively you were—and are—my dream team. I also want to acknowledge the contributions, both tangible and intan- gible, of mentor, teacher, and friend John Nguyet Erni. It was John who rst introduced me to cultural studies. In doing so, he forever aected how I think about the everyday objects that surround us. Other friends and col- leagues deserve special recognition for assisting me at various stages of this project. Kembrew McLeod, John Durham Peters, Jonathan Sterne, and Siva Vaidhyanathan provided the advice, perspective, and support I needed pre- cisely when I needed it. My gratitude extends to the Conjunctures group for oering a safe space in which to try out new ideas. Charles Acland, Marty Allor, Anne Balsamo, Briankle Chang, Melissa Deem, Ron Greene, James Hay, Lisa Henderson, Gil Rodman, Greg Seigworth, Mehdi Semati, Jennifer Slack, Charlie Stivale, and Greg Wise have been especially helpful in this regard. anks are also due to Henry A. Giroux, Gary Hall, and Julia T. Wood for the condence they’ve displayed in my work, and to Tony Falzone for helping me to navigate the murky waters of permission culture. x | acknowledgments [...]... abstract index of their value Instead of favoring either of these definitions of commodity, I wish to locate books in the tension between them What interests me are those moments in which they’re treated either as generic stuff or as hallowed objects, as well as the labor it takes to transform books from the one into the other This is nothing other than the work of culture Edges The everyday is a central... fact, the practice of selling unbound books lingered into the first half of the twentieth century, though by then it had less to do with conducting business on the cheap Custom-bound books had become marks of distinction in an age of ascendant mass manufacture, connoting the objects’ rarity and their owners’ prestige.51 In any event, precisely when in the course of their THE LATE AGE OF PRINT | 11  printing,... spinoffs based on popular literary characters, to name just a few From electronic books and book superstores to online bookselling, and from Oprah Winfrey’s book club to Harry Potter, this book moves among some of the most prominent—indeed, commonplace—aspects of everyday book culture today Its aim is not only to map the prevalent and pedestrian character of books but also to explore what their everydayness... call into question the circulation of printed books and, implicitly, that of other mass-produced consumer goods Through the technology of e-books, cultural producers have problematized the notion that a majority of people ought to own these goods, not to mention the assumption that producers must relinquish in perpetuity their rights to the goods they sell E-books thus portend a shift away from the widespread... these words Nevertheless, the purpose of The Late Age of Print isn’t to make a fetish of books A substantial number of books about books have been published over the last decade or so, many of which rhapsodize about book collecting and care, the inveterate passion for reading, the wonder of libraries and bookstores, the highs imparted by the smell and texture of printed books—in a word, what Nicholas A... present even as it opens out onto the future In this book I attempt to glimpse the contours of the late age of print in some of the most prosaic activities characteristic of book culture today: browsing around a large retail bookstore; selling books online; scanning a book s bar code at the checkout counter; reading and discussing a popular work with a group; waiting on a line to buy a hotly anticipated... only they are somehow different I’m neither prepared to write an elegy for printed books, nor am I prepared to make the claim that little has changed—or should have changed— THE LATE AGE OF PRINT | 3  in the cultures of books over the past twenty-five, fifty, hundred, or five hundred years I genuinely value books, especially printed ones I’m surrounded by them as I write these words Nevertheless, the. .. realities of the book trade have come to be seen as so customary, so banal, as to be overlooked almost entirely today.27 It may be that the “crisis” of books is linked not only to purported decreases in the amount of reading but also to people’s misgivings about— or, more accurately, their lack of historical perspective on the economic organization of the book trade The work of Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean... e -book content I argue that e-books are an emergent technological form by which problems pertaining to the ownership and circulation of printed books are simultaneously posed and resolved The first section of this chapter represents a ground clearing of sorts Because so much of the debate surrounding e-books has tended to hinge on the degree to which they reproduce the form and function of their printed... are the “givens” of book culture, as it were Their familiarity often THE LATE AGE OF PRINT | 9  makes them recede into the deep background of experience, so that at first glance—and maybe even after a second look—they’re apt to seem boring or unremarkable (Why do books have copyright pages? What allows me to pass along a book once I’ve purchased it? Why all those codes and symbols on the backs of most . in the present even as it opens out onto the future. In this book I attempt to glimpse the contours of the late age of print in some of the most prosaic activities characteristic of book culture. The Late Age of Print The Late Age of Print C o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y P r e s s   |   n e w y o r k everyday book Culture from Consumerism to Control Ted Striphas Columbia. testament to Philip’s vision, and to the vision of Columbia University Press, that they’ve permitted this book to deliver on one of the most compelling aspects of the late age of print. My mother,