The Late Age of Print
The Late Age of Print
EVERYDAY BOOK CULTURE
FROM CONSUMERISM TO CONTROL
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2009 Columbia University Press
Paperback edition, 2011
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51964-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Striphas, Theodore G.
The late age of print : everyday book culture from consumerism to control / Ted Striphas.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-14814-6 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-231-14815-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Book industries and tradeUnited States. 2. Books and readingUnited States. 3. Publishers and publishingUnited States. 5. Electronic publishingUnited States. 6. Internet bookstoresUnited States. I. Title.
Z471.S85 2009
381.45002dc22
A Columbia University Press E-book.
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Designed by Lisa Hamm
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
Contents
No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com
THE CLOTH EDITION of The Late Age of Print appeared a little less than two years ago, and already book culture looks noticeably different. The Barnes & Noble bookstore chain is currently fighting off a hostile takeover. Borders, the other leading big-box bookseller in the United States, is hanging on by a financial thread. Oprah Winfrey announced that the 20102011 season of The Oprah Winfrey Show will be her last, a decision that will likely bring an end to her book club; however, her mission to get the whole country reading again may continue with the One Book, One Twitter program, which promises to get a zillion people all reading and talking about books worldwidealbeit in installments of 140 characters or less. Harry Potter remains a cultural icon, to be sure, and his attorneys remain amply occupied both initiating and responding to intellectual property infringement suits. The bestselling book series seems to be settling comfortably into its retirement, though, initially as a movie franchise and more recently as a theme park ride in Florida. Meanwhile, new sensations have emerged on the book scene, chief among them Stephenie Meyers vampire series for young adults, Twilight, as well as all the Readers, Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other electronic devices that promise to thrust reading headlong into the digital ageassuming, of course, theyre not eclipsed by the long shadow of Google.
These and other shifts underscore the persistent unevenness, or dynamism, of contemporary book culture, which is one of the principal themes I explore in The Late Age of Print. Collectively, they suggest that booksand here Im referring to printed, paper ones, or what some have lately taken to calling p-booksremain important artifacts in todays world, even if their social meanings, preferred uses, and sense of prestige seem to be called into question as never before. Certain interested parties even go so far as to suggest that the era of printed books is nearing its end. They justify their claims by suggesting that these items may exist in the present day, yet for all practical purposes theyre not of the present day. Its time to move on, they say. These false prophets fail to acknowledge how this strange temporal condition is hardly unique to our own time. In fact, its one of the most enduring attributes of printed books in history.
Since their first appearance in the West more than five hundred years ago, printed books have been temporally unsettled, and unsettling. Bucking the conventional wisdom that says printing was a quintessentially modern achievement, the cultural studies scholar James Carey observes that the book was the culminating event in medieval culture before it was the first invention of the modern world. The printed book is in the first instance an agent of the continuity of medieval culture rather than its rupture. This is one of the strange qualities I try to put my finger on in the pages that follow; namely, that printed books always seem to be both in and out of sync with the presentwhenever the present may be.
What exactly does it mean, then, to think about these objects as agents of continuity, or as technologies disposed to linking together past and present? The specific turn of phrase may be Careys, but the idea behind it belongs to the Canadian economic historian turned communication theorist, Harold Adams Innis. Throughout his career, Innis obsessed about staplesnot the kind you use to fasten together pieces of paper, thankfully, but rather the raw materials that are vital to human well-being. These he saw as the building blocks of civilization, for the pursuit of them led otherwise disparate peoples to engage in extraordinary acts of coordination, cooperation, and social integration. But staples also had something like the opposite effect as well. Historically, the depletion of key resources in one locale has tended to compel people to go searching for them elsewhere, resulting in territorial expansion and, in more extreme cases, conquest. Two of Inniss earliest booksone on beaver fur, the other on codfishhelped him to recognize later in his career that the category staple could include items beyond the basic stock of shelter, nourishment, and clothing. Perhaps his most important insight was that communication was a staple, and that communication technologies therefore constituted a fundamental part of the material means by which societies created, maintained, repaired, transformed, and sometimes even destroyed themselves.
A series of detailed studies of both ancient and contemporary civilizationsfrom Babylon and Byzantium to Britain and beyondhelped Innis refine his understanding of communication. He began by distinguishing between two major types of communication technologies. The first of these, consisting of durable materials such as parchment, clay, and stone, facilitate the persistence of messages across time, and thus the endurance of tradition and social custom. The other type, consisting of lighter, less sturdy materials such as newsprint, celluloid film, and transistors, facilitate the extension of messages across space, and thus the administration of territories inhabited by distant populations. An over-emphasis on time-binding technologies could lead to insular groupings in which tradition triumphs over innovation. A surfeit of space-binding technologies, on the other hand, could contribute to sprawling civilizations that are dismissive of custom and thus neurotic about maintaining social and political control.
Theres much to criticize in Inniss theory of the role of communication in history. Its certainly open to the charge of technological determinism, despite his protests to the contrary. Moreover, like many intellectuals who came of age in the first half of the twentieth century, Inniss concern for the rise and fall of civilizations emerged against the backdrop of two grisly World Wars, the terrifying effects of the atomic bomb, and ultimately the unshakable feeling that modern Western civilization was on the verge of collapse. This isnt a fault of the work per se, but it infuses Inniss writings with an epic sweep, negative tone, and sense of gravity that have fallen out of favor today.
