Late Age On the Radio

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Late Age On the Radio

March 6, 2014 About the Book, Algorithmic Culture, Quick Takes No comments

Just a quick post linking you to my latest radio interview, with WFHB-Bloomington’s Doug Storm. Doug is one of the hosts of a great program called “Interchange,” and this past Tuesday I was delighted to share with him a broad-ranging conversation about many of the topics I address in The Late Age of Print—the longevity of books, print (and paper) culture, reading practices, taste hierarchies, and more. Toward the end, the conversation turned to my latest work, on the politics of algorithmic culture.

The program lasts about an hour. Enjoy!

Books as Christmas Gifts

December 5, 2013 About the Book, Quick Takes No comments

Did you know that books were among the very first commercial Christmas presents? That’s right—printed books were integral in helping to invent the modern, consumer-oriented Christmas holiday. Before then it was customary to give food or, if you were wealthy, a monetary “tip” to those who were less well off financially. (The latter might come to a rich person’s door and demand the “tip,” in fact.) The gift of a printed book changed all that, helping to defuse the class antagonism that typically rose to the surface around the winter holidays.

You can read more about the details of this fascinating history in my post from a few years ago on “How the Books Saved Christmas.” And if you’re interested in a broader history of the role books played in the invention of contemporary consumer culture, then you should check out The Late Age of Print. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, it makes a great gift.

If You Liked the Cover of The Late Age of Print…

July 29, 2013 About the Book, Book Art, Quick Takes No comments

…then you’re bound to like Art Made From Books: Altered, Sculpted, Carved, Transformed, compiled by Laura Heyenga and just out from Chronicle Books. The cover features one of Cara Barer’s striking book photographs—and if it looks somewhat familiar, it should. Another of her amazing images appears on the cover of Late Age.

And, in other important news, don’t forget—ONLY TWO MORE DAYS REMAIN to download an e-edition of The Late Age of Print for a tweet or Facebook post. Don’t miss it! The freebie will be gone as of August 1, 2013.

Did You Know…

July 25, 2013 About the Book, Hype, Quick Takes No comments

…that The Late Age of Print makes an excellent course text? With chapters on Harry Potter, Amazon.com, e-books, Oprah’s Book Club, and more, it’s chock full of relatable material for college undergraduates. Graduate students will appreciate the subject matter, too, along with the rich theoretical and historical context the book provides. If you teach courses on any of the following topics, then you might want to consider adopting Late Age:

Media History
Literary History
History of Technology
Communication History
Book History
History of Reading
History of Literacy
History of Print
New Media
Cultural Studies
Popular Culture
Everyday Life
Digital Humanities

If you teach a class using The Late Age of Print that’s not listed here, I’d love to hear from you! I’ll be sure to add it to the roster.

And, in other important news, don’t forget that ONLY SIX DAYS REMAIN to <a title="Download The Late Age of Print" href="http://www additional resources.thelateageofprint.org/download”>download the e-edition of Late Age for the small “price” of a tweet or Facebook Post. Yeah, for real. Do it before time runs out!

Countdown to the End

July 24, 2013 About the Book, Hype, Quick Takes No comments

Fair warning: there’s just ONE WEEK LEFT to download the e-edition of The Late Age of Print. It will only cost you a tweet or a Facebook post. Beginning August 1st, 2013, if you want the book, then you’ll have to buy it—in other words, for money!

This link will take you to the download page.

Thanks, and I hope you enjoy. And while you’re at it, why not put a little goodwill back into the world. Help support The Late Age of Print and my wonderful publisher Columbia University Press by liking the book’s Facebook Page, posting a review, assigning it in your classes, or, heck, even choosing to buy a physical copy. My kid needs to eat, you know.

NYT on Amazon's Prices

July 6, 2013 About the Book, Quick Takes No comments

Just a quick post to direct your attention to an article by David Streitfeld, published on Friday, July 5th in the physical edition of the New York Times (and published online a day earlier). It concerns Amazon.com’s prices, specifically with respect to independent and university press books.

I’m calling attention to the piece for several reasons. First, it raises important questions about Amazon’s role as a cultural intermediary in the wake of Borders’ demise, Barnes & Noble’s slide, and the ongoing shakeout of independent bookstores. Second, I happen to be quoted in the story. Here’s what I had to say, echoing some of my points in Chapters 2 and 3 of Late Age, in addition to the Preface to the paperback edition:

“Amazon is doing something vitally important for book culture by making books readily available in places they might not otherwise exist,” said Ted Striphas, an associate professor at Indiana University Bloomington. “But culture is best when it is robust and decentralized, not when there is a single authority that controls the bulk of every transaction.”

When Mr. Striphas’s book, “The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control,” first appeared in paperback in 2011, Amazon sold it for $17.50, the author said. Now it is $19.

“There’s not much competition to sell my book,” Mr. Striphas said. “The conspiracy theorist would say Amazon understands this.”

Needless to say, the rest of the piece is worth the read, too . My thanks to David for giving me the opportunity to speak to this important issue.

Free Download and Other News

June 25, 2013 About the Book, Related Work No comments

Sorry, dear readers, for the precipitous falloff in posting. I was on a roll during the first two or three years of The Late Age of Print blog, but since then I’ve been overwhelmed by administrative duties, my ongoing research on the topic of algorithmic culture (as well as some other side projects), and helping to raise a preschooler. Blogging has become something of a luxury of late. Not to worry, though: I’m not hanging up my gloves, though obviously I’m backing off a bit.

I’m writing, first of all, to alert you to my latest interview, appearing on Figure/Ground. If you’re not familiar with F/G, it’s a fantastic “open source, student-led, para-academic collaboration.” There you’ll find an outstanding series of interviews with leading figures in media/technology studies—people like Ian Bogost, Jodi Dean, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Gary Genosko, Katherine Hayles, Henry Jenkins, Douglas Kellner, Robert McChesney, Eric McLuhan, John Durham Peters, Douglas Rushkoff, Peter Zhang, and a host of others. Needless to say, I’m honored to join such distinguished company. I thank Justin Dowdall for taking the time to prepare such challenging questions.

I’m also writing to give you some fair warning. Columbia University Press, my publisher, and I have been in talks for a few months about the freely downloadable, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. As you may know, it’s been accessible via this blog for more than four years now. I don’t have an accurate count of the number of times it’s been downloaded, though I can assure you the number would be reasonably impressive. But it’s been four years, and print sales have slowed somewhat. Back in December I implemented a “pay with a Tweet” program, requiring anyone who wanted to download the book without paying also to spread the word about the book on Twitter or Facebook. That’s helped to jumpstart sales a bit, but in any case my editor at Columbia and I agreed that it’s finally time to pull the plug on the free download. I hope you’ll understand.

I plan on taking the free PDF down at the end of July. If you still want the book for the cost of a tweet or a Facebook post, this is your last chance (of course, I’d welcome reviews on Amazon.com or additional likes on the book’s Facebook page, too). After that…well, you know the drill.

Late Age of Print – the Podcast

January 22, 2013 About the Book, Book History, Digital Humanities, Hype, Related Work No comments

Welcome back and happy new year! Okay—so 2013 is more than three weeks old at this point. What can I say? The semester started and I needed to hit the ground running. In any case I’m pleased to be back and glad that you are, too.

My first post of the year is actually something of an old one, or at least it’s about new material that was produced about eighteen months ago. Back in the summer of 2011 I keynoted the Association for Cultural Studies Summer Institute in Ghent, Belgium. It was a blast—and not only because I got to talk about algorithmic culture and interact with a host of bright faculty and students. I also recorded a podcast there with Janneke Adema, a Ph.D. student at Coventry University, UK whose work on the future of scholarly publishing is excellent and whose blog, Open Reflections, I recommend highly.

Janneke and I sat down in Ghent for the better part of an hour for a fairly wide-ranging conversation, much of it having to do with The Late Age of Print and my experiments in digital publishing. It was real treat to revisit Late Age after a couple of years and to discuss some of the choices I made while I was writing it. I’ve long thought the book was a tad quirky in its approach, and so the podcast gave me a wonderful opportunity to provide some missing explanation and backstory. It was also great to have a chance to foreground some of the experimental digital publishing tools I’ve created, as I almost never put this aspect of my work on the same level as my written scholarship (though this is changing).

The resulting podcast, “The Late Age of Print and the Future of Cultural Studies,” is part of the journal Culture Machine’s podcast series. Janneke and I discussed the following:

How have digital technologies affected my research and writing practices?
What advice would I, as a creator of digital scholarly tools, give to early career scholars seeking to undertake similar work?
Why do I experiment with modes of scholarly communication, or seek “to perform scholarly communication differently?”
How do I approach the history of books and reading, and how does my approach differ from more ethnographically oriented work?
How did I find the story amid the numerous topics I wrestle with in The Late Age of Print?

I hope you like the podcast. Do feel welcome to share it on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever. And speaking of social media, don’t forget—if you haven’t already, you can still download a Creative Commons-licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. It will only cost a tweet or a post on Facebook. Yes, really.

The Season for Giving

December 21, 2012 About the Book, Distribution, Hype No comments

“As my bishop would say, I’m livin’ because of my givin’.”
—Rev. Run

‘Tis the season for giving, and in the spirit of the season I’m giving away free downloads of The Late Age of Print.

Well, maybe “free” isn’t exactly the right word. The download will cost you a tweet, or a post on your Facebook wall. But hey—that’s a pretty reasonable price for something that took me more than five years to research, write, and publish, wouldn’t you agree?

I’m managing the release with a new social downloading system that I’m excited to tell you about. It’s called, appropriately enough, “Pay With a Tweet.” I discovered it via the 40kBooks blog, whose editors recently released a collection of their best interviews for 2012 (including, ahem, one with me) using the social payment system. I was really intrigued, and even more intrigued once I got it up and running here on this site.

A free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age has been available since the physical book was published back in 2009. But truth be told, I grew somewhat frustrated by what I perceived to be the unevenness of the exchange. That’s why I’m so taken with the idea of paying for the book socially: you help me get the word out about the book, and in return you get a free digital copy. If you’re interested in giving back even more, you can also write a review of Late Age or like the book’s page on Facebook.

Of course, none of that should preclude you from buying a physical copy of the book. The paperback edition contains a new foreword that does not appear in the free e-edition, so if you want my most up-to-date thoughts about the late age of print, that’s where you’ll want to go.

Happy holidays, dear readers. Thanks for all of your support, this year and beyond. I’ll see you again in early 2013.

Late Age of Print Now 50% Off!

April 2, 2012 About the Book, Quick Takes No comments

Columbia University Press is holding its annual spring sale, and by sale, I mean S-A-L-E! All CUP titles, including The Late Age of Print, are now 50% off. (The deal is for North American orders only. Sorry, rest of world!) Here’s the link to the Late Age page on the CUP website; just enter the promo code “SALE” when you check out to get the discount. Get it while it’s hot…and cheap!

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