"Harry Potter Grows Up": The Meaning Behind a Cliché

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Late Age of Print, the final chapter of the book focuses on the extraordinary literary sensation that is Harry Potter. So, needless to say, Harry Potter has been on my mind quite a bit lately, especially with today's release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I don't have much to say about the latest film, honestly, not having yet seen it -- although I intend to, as I've seen the previous six movies and have read/enjoyed all seven books. Instead, what I've been thinking about lately is the age of Harry Potter, or rather that of his fans.

I teach an undergraduate course at the 300 or Junior level called "The Cultures of Books and Reading"; during one week, we focus on the many-headed Harry Potter phenomenon. When I first launched the book class, back in 2006, I was excited to realize that my students were basically Harry's contemporaries. Those among them who were eleven years old -- Harry's age -- when the series launched in 1997 were twenty in 2006, which is the typical age of most college Juniors.

But now it's four years later, and those twenty year-olds are turning twenty-four. Yes, that's right, twenty-four -- practically a quarter century. Graduate school age. Marrying age. Getting established in one's career age. Even baby-having age. I'm feeling old just writing about them! Indeed, it's not just that Harry Potter and the actors who portray him and his friends on screen have grown up. The whole fan culture surrounding Harry Potter has grown up, too, to the point where, as with Star Wars fans, we might even start thinking about a whole new generation of Potter enthusiasts.

This is what the release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows really means. It marks the beginning of the end of the film adaptations, yet it also marks the beginning of the beginning of the next generation of Potter fandom. What role, if any, will the books, films, toys, games, candy, costumes, etc. play in their lives? And what new meanings will the Harry Potter franchise take on once the torch gets passed, or rather shared?

Ambivalently Scribd

Back in March I announced on my other blog that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I'd negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book's presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd's mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to feel less comfortable with the book's presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky -- things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there's one new feature I'm not feeling: ads by Google. Here's a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it's what subsidizes the cost of my own and others' "free" experience.

Here's the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This 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 defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I'm pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It's not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 "reads" of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I've always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others -- hopefully many others -- go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I'm more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a "commercial" or "non-commercial" use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it's built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered "non-commercial?" What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of "non-commercial" once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don't have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, "no." Then again, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an issue that's never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I'll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

As I've said here before, though, I recently ported The Differences and Repetitions Wiki from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I'm not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project

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 my own book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control? 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!

Going mobile

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 200 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!?

Download The Late Age of Print

One of the defining attributes of the late age of print is the erosion of old publishing certainties. Among them is the notion that the free circulation of book content leads inevitably to lost sales. Another is the belief that strong, proprietary systems are the best way for publishers and authors to secure value in their intellectual properties. Maybe it's too soon to let go of these notions completely. It's fast becoming clear, however, that they cannot be taken for granted any longer.

There are two ways of responding to the erosion of old certainties like these. One way is to dig in your heels, hoping to keep familiar ground from shifting under your feet. The other is to allow the erosion to expose opportunities that may have been buried underfoot all along. With the latter you risk coming up empty, but with the former you risk something worse -- inertia.

I'm pleased to report that my publisher, Columbia University Press, isn't one of those digging in its heels. It's taken the bold step of releasing The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book. You can download the e-edition by clicking here. The file is a "zipped" .pdf of the complete contents of Late Age, minus one image, for which I was (ironically) unable to secure electronic publishing rights.

I thank Columbia University Press for releasing my book electronically under a Creative Commons license. In doing so, it's embraced the extraordinary spirit of openness that is beginning to flourish in the late age of print. Mine is the first book the Press has decided to release in this way. Here's hoping that many more will follow.

Gimme some liquid theory

This is probably one of the most intriguing developments in academic book publishing to happen in a long time....

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A CALL FOR OPEN COLLABORATION FROM THE CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL
http://www.culturemachine.net

Culture Machine is seeking open collaboration on the writing and editing of the first volume of its online Liquid Books series, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader: http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader.

The first provisional version of this volume -- New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (Version 1.0) -- has been put together by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall as a follow-up to their 2006 "woodware" edited collection, New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory (Edinburgh University Press and Georgia University Press).

From here on in, however, the idea is for this new online "liquid book" -- to which everyone is invited to contribute -- to be written and developed in an open, co-operative, decentralised, multi-user-generated fashion: not just by its initial "authors," "editors," or "creators," but by a multiplicity of collaborators distributed around the world.

In this way, the New Cultural Studies Reader will be freely available for anyone, anywhere, to read, reproduce and distribute. Once they have requested access, users will also be able to rewrite, add to, edit, annotate, tag, remix, reformat, reinvent and reuse this reader, or produce alternative parallel versions of it, however they wish. In fact, they are expressly invited and encouraged to do so, as the project relies on this intervention.

It is hoped that the New Cultural Studies: Liquid Theory Reader project will raise a number of important questions for ideas of academic authorship, attribution, publication, citation, accreditation, fair use, quality control, peer review, copyright, intellectual property, content creation and cultural studies. For instance, with its open editing and free content the project decenters the author and editor functions, making everyone potential authors/editors. It also addresses an issue raised recently by Geert Lovink: why are wikis not utilised more to create, develop and change theory and theoretical concepts, instead of theory continuing to be considered as the "terrain of the sole author who contemplates the world, preferably offline, surrounded by a pile of books, a fountain pen, and a notebook"? At the same time, in "What Is an Author?", Foucault warns that any attempt to avoid using the concept of the author to close and fix the meaning of the text risks leading to a limit and a unity being imposed on the text in a different way: by means of the concept of the "work." So to what extent does users’ ability to rewrite, remix, reversion and reinvent this liquid "book" render untenable any attempt to impose a limit and a unity on it as a "work?" And what are the political, ethical and social consequences of such ‘liquidity’ for ideas that depend on the concept of the "work" for their effectivity: those concerning attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property, academic success, promotion, tenure, and so on?

To find out more, please go to:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/New+Cultural+Studies:+The+Liquid+Theory+Reader

For a quick and easy-to-read guide on how to collaborate on the writing and editing of New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader, please visit:
http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com/How-to-Contribute-to-a-Liquid-Book


Clare Birchall and Gary Hall

Introducing The Late Age of Print blog

I'm pleased to announce that my new blog, The Late Age of Print, is now up and active. It's a companion to my book of the same name, which will be published by Columbia University Press in the next month or so. (You can learn more about the book by clicking on the link on the D&R sidebar at right.) This isn't the new site's grand opening, which I've planned to coincide with the release of the book. I'm still adding pages, links, and features, so it's best to describe this as the site's "soft opening."

The Late Age of Print blog will certainly have some thematic and conceptual overlap with D&R, but the former has a much more specific focus on the past, present, and future of books and book culture than does the latter. The new blog's tagline is “Beyond the Book,” which is something of a pun in that it both extends the arguments I introduce in Late Age and provides a forum for reflecting on the purpose, meaning, and value of books at a time when, according to some, the medium has had its heyday.

So where does the new blog leave D&R? My intention is to continue posting here, albeit a bit less regularly. I'll try to keep cross-posting to a minimum, although from time to time I imagine there will be appropriate material for me to do so. I may also try to solicit more guest posts for D&R, which in the past have generated some impressive response.

In any case, I do hope you enjoy The Late Age of Print blog. Please spread the word about it, link to it, comment on it, etc. And thank you for your continued readership of D&R.

Going commercial

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Above you'll find a promo video for a Columbia University Press book called American Pests. Tomorrow I'm shooting one of these promos for my book, The Late Age of Print. I'm excited to do it, but at the same time I'm feeling a little daunted. I've done my best to avoid video blogging and indeed entering into the video age more generally. I guess it's all finally catching up with me.

What's intriguing about the prospect of shooting a video for my book--beyond whatever potential there may be for getting the latter noticed--is what the promo tells us about the changing nature of book authorship. Never did I imagine having to become a multimedia personality when I began work on The Late Age of Print. I certainly wasn't trained for that in graduate school!

I suppose I was operating under what is, today, an increasingly antiquated understanding of authors and their work. That is, I had erroneously assumed that authors still could get away only with writing words and perhaps making an occasional public (i.e., "live") presentation of their work. I should have known better, given the arguments and subject matter of The Late Age of Print. If university presses are on to making videos, moreover, then you can be pretty sure the era in which authors were strictly writers has just about come to an end. Video killed the radio star twenty five years ago. Today, video has just about finished off the reclusive book writer, too.

I'll let you know how the shoot turns out, and once the promo is finished I'll post it here. It will also be available on the Columbia University Press "channel" on YouTube.

"...not a democracy"

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There was a telling moment in last night's Inside the Actors Studio interview with Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the film adaptation of the bestselling book series. About midway through the video sequence embedded above, host James Lipton asks Radcliffe how he felt about the various romantic pairings author J. K. Rowling had crafted for her characters. Lipton then admits that he once believed Harry and Hermione Granger would eventually end up together, whereupon the studio audience applauds. "Vox populi," Lipton observes.

Radcliffe's response? "The Harry Potter series is not a democracy." Truer words haven't been spoken.

Houston, we have a cover

At long last my book, The Late Age of Print, has a cover. I absolutely love it.


The cover is designed around an image by the photographer Cara Barer, whose work my friend Rachel turned me on to. (Thanks, Rachel.) I like how it captures both the beauty and grunginess of printed books--their persistence and decay--in our time. This is one of the key themes or tensions that I explore throughout The Late Age of Print. I'm thrilled with how the designers at Columbia University Press have managed to capture and convey it with such simplicity.

The other bit of good news is that The Late Age of Print is now listing on Amazon.com, with a release date set for sometime in March 2009. You cannot yet pre-order it, unfortunately, since the book hasn't been priced. You can sign up to be notified by email when it becomes available, though.

I just received the final page proofs yesterday, incidentally, and the book is being indexed as we speak. What a joy to watch the text's transformation into an artifact! Stay tuned for more.

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P.S. A quick update to say that The Late Age of Print is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. It costs $27.50 in hardback, which, given the price of academic books these days, is a pretty good deal. Kudos to Columbia University Press for keeping the price down.

Books and the business of business models

My friend Dustin Howes alerted me to this recent Q&A with author Seth Godin, who talks about the future of the book biz. Here's an excerpt:

Q: What's the most important lesson the book publishing industry can learn from the music industry?

A: The market doesn't care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there's even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, "if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don't pirate stuff cause it's convenient and cheap..." I'm a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music. How are you betting?

I'm so pleased to hear someone else saying to the book industry, "lower your prices to generate interest and increase sales." This was my basic argument when I blogged last June about the Amazon e-reader, Kindle, and the possibilities it opened up for the book biz to rethink its pricing strategies.

The rest of Godin's Q&A is definitely worth checking out. He has lots of interesting material there on "content" versus "book" publishing (the latter he refers to as "the life and death of trees"), as well as on the importance of publishers servicing, rather than simply making money from, their markets.

Here's hoping his thoughts don't fall on deaf ears.

Kindle + Oprah = game changer?

Leave it to Oprah Winfrey. She's already changed what people read. Now she's out to change how they read by giving Amazon.com's e-reading device, Kindle, her coveted endorsement.

Oprah's official announcement came today on The Oprah Winfrey Show, although for several days now Amazon has been teasing the big news on its home page.

Amazon has been excruciatingly tight-lipped about who's been buying Kindle and how many units it's managed to sell. The consensus among technology commentators seems to be this: since its debut last November, Kindle has found its way mostly into the hands of older, gadget-savvy early adopters who don't mind dropping $350 on a stand alone mobile e-reading device.

Given how few people I've actually seen with a Kindle, I'd venture to say this is a rather small cadre indeed. Significantly, all but one of the Kindle users I've observed over the last year has been male.

In other words, Winfrey's endorsement could prove to be a real game changer. She has enormous reach among women between the ages of 18 and 54. That, combined with the Oprah Book Club, makes her an extraordinarily influential figure with exactly the population that purchases the most books in the United States.

The real challenge, it seems to me, will be for Winfrey to persuade her audience to part with a large chunk of cash during a major economic downturn. Amazon's decision to offer a $50 "Oprah Winfrey" rebate--about 15% off of Kindle's retail price--will be a major incentive in this regard. (By the way, the rebate also happens to be a smart way for Amazon to move its existing stock of Kindles to make way for generation 2.0.)

The other challenge will be for Winfrey to convince her audience that what makes a book a book are its words and images, and not its physical form. That could prove to be an even harder sell in the long run. As Jeff Gomez has observed in his book Print is Dead, it's hard for many people to shake the image of books as things made of paper, ink, and glue, which they're supposed "to hug...in bay windows on autumn days, basking in the warm glow of a fireplace with a cup of chamomile by their side."

The genius of Kindle is to marry e-reading with on-the-go book distribution. Its downfall thus far (beyond the concerns I've raised about its interface and matters of privacy) has been Amazon's apparent inability to connect the device with less gadget-inclined book readers. And in this regard, Oprah's endorsement of Kindle can only help bring e-reading to within eyeshot of the mainstream.

Hari Puttar takes Bollywood by storm...maybe

From Monday's BBC Entertainment News:

Warner sues over Puttar movie
Warner Bros says it wants to protect intellectual property rights.

Harry Potter maker Warner Bros is suing an Indian film company over the title of upcoming film Hari Puttar - A Comedy Of Terrors, according to reports.

Warner Bros feels the name is too similar to that of its world famous young wizard, according to trade paper The Hollywood Reporter.

With thanks to Simon Frost at the University of Southern Denmark for passing on the story to me, the complete version of which you can read here. I'm in the midst of finishing up a project right now, but some commentary on the suit should follow from me soon, hopefully.

Kindle vs. Itouch: The throwdown

FOR MORE ON E-READING, VISIT www.thelateageofprint.org

I can't believe it's been nearly a month since I last blogged. I'd resolved early in 2008 to post a couple of times a week whenever I could, and until June or so, I pretty much managed to stick to it. But for a variety of reasons July and now part of August got away from me. I thank you all for your patience. I'm glad to be back.

I've blogged off and on over the past several months about Amazon.com's e-reading device, Kindle. Well, I finally acquired one in early June and have spent my summer travels field-testing it in preparation for a paper I'll be presenting at the American Studies Association convention this October. I also happened to purchase an iPod Touch this summer, and despite Apple CEO Steve Jobs' claim that people don't read anymore, I've been indulging in Plato's Parmenides using the device's Stanza e-reading application. My experiences with both devices have been striking. Because their differences seem to me more acute than their similarities, I figured now might be an appropriate time for a Kindle versus iTouch "throwdown."

Kindle
I'll be honest: I'm pretty surprised by the reported success of Kindle and its rosy prospects for the future. The device does what it's supposed to do, more or less, but as sophisticated as it may be, Kindle still strikes me as fairly primitive.

For me, Kindle's "wow" factor comes mainly from the built-in EVDO wireless technology, which allows you to download any Kindle edition in the Amazon catalog anywhere, on the fly, without a separate laptop or mobile phone. As a researcher and writer, there's something alluring (and potentially, economically draining) about having instantaneous access to a library consisting of 125,000+ titles, many (although not all) of which cost less than their printed counterparts. No doubt Amazon wants users to second-guess making trips to the library or to nearby bookstores.

Still, I find title navigation to be awkward and unpredictable. It's easy enough to find my way to a Kindle book's cover, title page, interior chapters, and other major landmarks , but making my way through the highlights, notes and dog ears I've made rarely results in my ending up where I'd meant to go. The highlighting and note-making functions work well enough; their precision is limited, however, by the fact that you can only highlight entire lines rather than individual words, and only then on a single page at a time.

As for the much-heralded e-ink screen, it reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch, only crisper. The latter, incidentally was first released in 1973--around the time that color TV really began to take over in earnest in the U.S. from the old black and white system. I wish Amazon had taken a cue here and aimed for a color screen, although I realize that their doing so could have resulted in an undesirable price point for Kindle. The screen renders text quite well, although it still seems vaguely pixelated to me. Word spacing and character tracking could be improved. Images are another matter, though. A colleague to whom I showed my Kindle told me he was "disappointed" by the device's ability to render images. I agree.

Then, of course, there's Amazon's proprietary e-book format and its use of digital rights management. I've already blogged about these at length, so I won't belabor the point here except to say three words: open content, please!

iPod Touch
Talk about "wow" factor all around. The device looks great, it fits in the palm of your hand, and it's not a single-use device. (Kindle, incidentally, comes with an experimental web browser and plays mp3s.) This last point is especially important. I'm a fan of The Food Network's Alton Brown, who insists that kitchen devices dedicated to a single foodstuff generally ought to be avoided, for they too easily become superfluous. (Salad Shooter, anyone?) With a proliferation of high-tech gadgetry ranging from laptops to mobile phones, e-readers, and more, getting a device that can do more, and do "more" exceptionally well, should be the order of the day. That's what the iTouch delivers.

There are a bunch of e-reading applications available for the iPod Touch and iPhone, but for now, I prefer Stanza. It's free, as are the books associated with the software. The free content is both an advantage and a drawback. The advantage, of course, is that all Stanza books are available gratis, brought to you courtesy of the public domain using the non-proprietary, Open E-Book formatting standard. On the downside, Stanza only offers "classic" works of fiction and non-fiction. Anything current will have wait for decades to make its way to Stanza, a result of the egregious extension of copyright terms.

Text on the iTouch version of Stanza renders beautifully, and the tactile navigation's a breeze. The screen is bright, clear...and in color. The major limitation I see is the application's inability to mark text and to record annotations. Here Kindle is the clear winner. I realize, though, that not everyone reads books like me; I plod through text, underlining passages and making notes as I go. But for those who simply read, there shouldn't be much of a problem.

Bottom Line
If someone would only synthesize the best features of Kindle and the iTouch, then we'd have an exceptional e-reader on our hands. For now, Kindle wins on the number of available titles and annotation features, while iTouch/Stanza is ahead on just about everything else. On balance, I suppose that I'm more impressed with the latter than I am with the former.

More thoughts on Amazon's Kindle

This one comes to me somewhat circuitously, from my José Afonso Furtado Twitter feed. José is amazing. He Twitters about book news every day, practically all day, and I'm beginning to wonder when the man sleeps. His feed is like a stock market ticker, only for book mavens.

So apparently, Amazon.com's electronic reading device, Kindle, which I blogged about back in November, caused something of a stir at this year's BookExpo America. The event, which wrapped up this past weekend in New York City, is the major annual book industry trade gathering in the United States.

At the Expo, publishers expressed concern with the price of Amazon's Kindle editions. In almost all cases, they're lower than those of the corresponding bound, physical volumes, and in many instances, Amazon has been selling the e-editions at a loss.

This pricing strategy is consistent with the company's prevailing business model, which has tended to forgo short- to medium-term profit in favor of building longterm customer loyalty. With Kindle, Amazon's reasoning seems to be: a major economic incentive is the only way to encourage sufficient numbers of people to switch over to electronic books and thus to make the technology viable on a mass scale.

This scares the heck out of publishers, many of whom, as today's New York Times notes, want to charge the same amount of money for e- and p-books. (That's what I'm calling paper-based editions these days.) Their reasoning seems to go something like this: the book industry's hurting (isn't it always?), and the only way to increase profit is to eliminate as many fixed capital costs as possible.

What's intriguing to me about this latest ebook kerfuffle is the book industry's apparent short-sightedness. It seems to be assuming that there's an absolute price threshold below which it cannot sell enough books to maintain profitability. To put it differently, the industry seems disinclined toward Chris Anderson's notion of the long tail, which stresses sustained, aggregate sales of digital goods over the long term.

The BEA controversy therefore makes me wonder how much the book industry's professed economic woes, and indeed broader laments about the "decline of reading," have to do with publishers' unwillingness to get more creative with their pricing. It seems intuitive to raise prices to increase profits; this has been the book industry's fallback position for decades. But Amazon seems to be saying the opposite: lower your prices, and you'll gain readers and increase sales. Could there be a more apt illustration of 20th vs. 21st century business models?

With that said, I still have serious misgivings about Kindle, which I expressed back in November. I'm also planning to say more about Kindle here in the coming months and at this October's American Studies Association conference. Stay tuned.

Rockefeller UP goes CC

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Rockefeller University Press on Friday announced a shift in copyright policy for the three journals it publishes. The new policy allows authors to re-use their work in any way under a Creative Commons license, so that authors who wish to effectively make their work open and free may do so. The press publishes The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Journal of General Physiology.

It's only a news brief, but you can find it here. Way to go, RUP, and thanks for supporting open access to ideas! Let the trend continue!

The big announcement, at long last

I've been hinting for weeks (maybe longer) that I had a B-I-G announcement forthcoming about my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. At long last, here it is: the book will be published in 2009 by Columbia University Press!

I'm thrilled, needless to say, because Columbia's such an esteemed press and has published so many books I love: from Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping to Gary Cross' An All Consuming Century, and from David Henkin's City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's What Is Philosophy? and beyond.

What's also thrilling is that Columbia has agreed to make available, for free, a Creative Commons licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. It will be released on the internet, concurrent with the publication of the print edition of the book. This is the first time Columbia is producing a book this way, and given my own proclivities toward intellectual property (not to mention the arguments I make in the book), I couldn't be happier to be the test case. What's more, I'm pleased to see another major university press taking a strongly affirmative stance toward open access to ideas.

Many of you who read this blog will find yourselves thanked in the book's acknowledgments. For now, though, a big, blanket "thank you" to all who've supported me throughout the process of researching, writing, revising, and finalizing The Late Age of Print. It's funny--for someone who writes about book publishing, I feel like I learned as much about the book business by trying to get The Late Age of Print published as I did by actually writing it!

Print is dead

I've just added a new site to the blog roll: Jeff Gomez's Print is Dead. I discovered it by accident while doing some research on "the late age of print," which is a phrase Jay David Bolter coined and, as many of you know, is the title of my forthcoming book. I've only read a few of Jeff's posts thus far, and while we may come at some of the issues confronting today's book industry from different perspectives, it's clear he's got a lot of smart things to say. I love the title of his blog, too, which comes from a line Egon (Harold Ramis' character) delivers in the movie, Ghostbusters.

Speaking of The Late Age of Print (the book), I have a big, big, BIG announcement coming up very soon. Stay tuned--or whatever one does to keep one's attention on a blog. Would it be more apt to say, "ready your feed readers?" That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue now, does it?

All those trees!

An interesting post I thought I'd pass along from the Environmental News Network....

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PLANT A TREE FOR EVERY BOOK YOU READ

Want to get a new book but worry about its environmental impact? Worry a little bit less. With the help of Eco-Libris, you can plant a tree for every book you buy or read.

Says Raz Godelnik, an Eco-Libris co-founder, the company works with readers, publishers, writers, bookstores, and others in the book industry to balance out the paper used for any book by planting trees. About 20 million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper to be used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. Eco-Libris raises awareness about the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provides book lovers with a simple way to do something about it: plant a tree for every book they read. Ten dollars will cover tree planting for ten books.

To date, Eco-Libris has balanced out over 24,000 books, resulting in the planting of more than 31,500 new trees! Kedzie Press is collaborating with Eco-Libris in a "Million Tree-A-Thon" initiative to plant one million trees for one million books by the end of 2009.

The Eco-Libris program is being offered by some local bookstores; otherwise, it's easy to participate on-line.

Thumbs up, Eco-Libris.

You can read my interview with Eco-Libris here.

Ebooks: The future (???) of reading

It's funny how things come and go. I published an essay about a year ago in the journal Television and New Media about ebooks and electronic reading. It's had some response, and a version of the piece will be included in my forthcoming book, The Late Age of Print. Even so, there's been some sense for awhile now, particularly since the dot-com bust, that stand-alone electronic reading devices were pretty much over and done with--at least, for the time being. I know, I know: Sony's had one out for a few years now; I've seen and tried it at Borders. Nevertheless, it doesn't seem to have had a great deal of uptake, much less sparked widespread discussion about the future of books and reading.

That's starting to change with Amazon.com's recent announcement of Kindle, its electronic reading device. It's been featured on the cover of last week's Newsweek and in stories by NPR; it's also whipped the technology wing of the blogosphere into something of a frenzy. (D&R is no exception here.) Suddenly, ebooks and e-reading are sexy again, the stuff of public commentary and conversation.

I'll be honest: having researched and written at length on the history and technology of ebooks, I'm skeptical of Kindle's possibilities for success. Every few years an ebook "revolution" seems to flare up, only to flame out shortly thereafter. Witness all the hoopla surrounding the Rocket Ebook and other such devices, which were touted in the late 1990s as the Next Big Thing. Where are they now, other than selling for pocket change on eBay?

Though I may not be optimistic about Kindle's future, there are a few significant differences that set it a part from earlier stand-alone e-reading devices. The most significant factor for me is probably Amazon.com, which is unusually well-positioned to market and sell the reader. But even more interesting to me is the careful messaging that's going on around Kindle. In contrast to many earlier forays into the realm of ebooks and e-reading, Kindle isn't being marketed as a replacement for printed books. Instead, media reports about the device, and indeed the marketing surrounding it, all speak reverentially about the smells, sounds, and textures of printed books. The Newsweek article I mentioned earlier even touted the printed book as having one of the best "interfaces" (to impose an anachronism) of all media hitherto created. Kindle's being sold not as a replacement for printed books, but rather as a supplement to them, or even as a way of augmenting them. This definitely shows signs of having learned from past mistakes.

Here are a couple of the rubs for me. First, Kindle can only hold 200 books. Now, that may sound like a lot, but at a time when iPods and other such devices can hold thousands of megabyte-consuming songs, couldn't the designers of Kindle have done better with what is, after all, mostly text? What's more disturbing to me, though, are the terms of service Kindle and many other ebook devices attempt to impose. Once you buy a book and download it to your Kindle, you're done--as in, you can't pass it on to anyone else due to embedded digital rights management technology. This "friendly" new e-reading device, like many digital technologies abounding today, is working actively, if quietly, to undermine the First Sale Doctrine. This basically says (among other things) that once someone has sold you some good, she or he is no longer at liberty to dictate to whom you can give or sell it. Kindle thus represents yet another salvo in the book publishing industry's ongoing war against the used and pass along book trades. Worse, now a major bookseller is in cahoots with the publishers.

I can understand why the book industry, as well as the Author's Guild and the sellers of new books, might be discomforted by the passing on and resale of books. None of these groups profits directly from the circulation of these objects in the after market. But I wonder: is it as simple as that? Does cutting off the ability to circulate books after their first sale really help authors and publishers? Or is this an unimaginative way of creating demand by manufacturing artificial conditions of scarcity, a way that neglects the degree to which informal and unauthorized economies of exchange actually can increase people's desire for at least some consumer goods? (Here I'll refer you to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which addresses these concerns more cogently and in more detail than I can here.)

All that to say, if you really want to revere the printed book (and I'm talking to you, Amazon.com), you need to respect its ability to circulate more or less freely and to create ebook devices that do the same. Lock down culture all you want. I'm not buying until I start seeing some keys.


Coming soon: my reflections on this little ditty from Amazon.com, which now appears on the page for a book I co-edited called Communication as...: Perspectives on Theory: "Upgrade this book for $9.19 more, and you can read, search, and annotate every page online. See details...." Sigh.