Minding Each Others' Business ...

The book's crippling flaw is Striphas's decision to ignore the other half of an indivisible subject

- Full review below.

Minding Each Others' ... Book Cover

Minding Each Others' Business: Publishers and Booksellers in the Late Age of Print

The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control

Striphas, Ted, New York, Columbia University Press, c2009 - 978-0-231-1814-6

242 pp., rrp $27.50

– Review by M. F. McAuliffe, Contributing Editor, Gobshite Quarterly

Striphas suggests that we are currently living through a paradigm change, "tectonic plates pushing against one another". It has also seemed to me that we are living through an epochal convulsion. The convulsion in this particular case is from printed books to e-books.

The Late Age of Print is essentially an investigation of history to make three arguments. The first is that the move from printed books to e-books is (no more than) another turn of the wheel in the evolution of communication from personal utterance, to handwriting, to print.

The second argument is that through digital rights management, a matter of copyright law, e-books finally offer publishers a way to stamp out the 2nd-hand book trade. Striphas assembles evidence to show that this "uncompensated" circulation of books has exercised publishers for over a hundred years.

The third argument is that major publishers, using copyright law to prosecute locally affordable (pirate) editions in the 3rd world, notably in eastern and southern Asia, are actually penalizing–and suppressing some parts of the cultures of–those regions, for the poverty which western commercial interests, such as the currency manipulations of the late 1990s–have themselves created.

In the Harry Potter chapter Striphas describes publishers and booksellers both now artificially creating scarcity–simultaneous, world-wide release-dates for mega blockbusters–in order to maximize sales; publishers hiring lawyers to police the printeries of the world in order to quash pirated editions (book-alikes, knock-offs, parodies), and to physically destroy these locally-affordable products; publishers going to court to assert that Bengali and Chinese knock-offs, which also may include folk-variations from those cultures, are both actionable and suppressible.

That's most of the book in outline.

Striphas's account of the lock-downable features of e-books is fine; his history is unexceptional–literary history, industrial history–supermarkets were actually modeled on bookstores, built-in bookcases were designed to stimulate book sales during the Great Depression–until the case study of the Barnes and Noble Superstore in Durham, North Carolina.

Striphas points out that the establishment of a superstore is a complex, multi-dimensional affair, not the simple fall from grace–the friendly, organic, local independent bookstore–it is often claimed to be. As a general claim, that is also unexceptionable. He goes on to point out that though the Durham store did increase traffic, and did have the deleterious effects on the environment the Charlottesville protesters said it would, it gave jobs to Durham's black residents, who had been unfairly denied jobs for decades.

Immediately following this, the matter of possible unfair trade advantages given to chain bookstores is set aside very quickly with a not-proven verdict in one court-case, and a possible future court-case prevented by the death of the original plaintiff (pp. 75-76).

There is no further mention of the chains' effects on publishing decisions or of their dealings and decision-making with major publishers. Redressing unfair unemployment in the black community is a trump card, a conversation-stopper; at this point the book takes on the smell of special pleading.

It might be said that the focus of Striphas's book is book-manufacture, delivery-infrastructure, and bookselling, that his subject is the evolving mechanism of delivering the objects we call books in sufficient quantity to meet ever-growing demand; that his subject also includes some unexpected consequences of maximizing profit via copyright law, such as publishers' expanding the definition of pirate editions to an unprecedented degree and prosecuting them globally with unjust and unprecedented force; and that that the chains' dealings with major publishers in terms of book content (particularly fiction) lie outside the scope of this subject.

I would argue that books are objects, but we read them for what they tell us or invite us to imagine; they are experiments in controlled consciousness. What we buy is that experiment. Ignoring the changes to the way books are bought, and changes to which books are bought via the way books are sold, is to ignore the at an ever-increasing profit half of supplying the ever-increasing demand.

The book I was expecting after reading the first two chapters of The Late Age of Print would have contained an examination of the chains' effects on publishing; it would have shown the employment-bump in Durham as part of a much larger complexity.

It's not just the 2nd-hand circulation of books that's being controlled in new and absolute ways.

For decades corporate publishers have sought to control consumers' behaviour via copyright. See, for example, The Pirates and the Mouse: Disney's War Against the Counterculture–Levin, Bob, Seattle, Fantagraphics, 2003–a book that details the ways in which Disney, using copyright laws, defended certain social norms and condemned others. The war abroad is the war at home, and always has been.

See also Other Peoples' Words–McPhee, Hillary, Picador, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 2001–where the backstory to the rise and fall of a small Australian publishing house is Penguin UK's requirement of Penguin Australia to return ever-increasing amounts of revenue to the home country, regardless of what that meant for Australian books and the Australian book market.

Corporate publishers have demonstrated, over a considerable time, a determined and quite conscious decision to quash any kind of competition, even of material which has nothing to do with previously copyrighted works.

After Star Wars, movie studios decided to concentrate on blockbusters to generate unprecedented profit, instead of making small movies that generate modest profits. The major publishers, which had just been bought by the movie studios, followed suit: they decided to kill the mid-list–small books by fairly unknown writers, which made modest profits – and to produce blockbusters instead. That decision was the single greatest factor moving the publishing industry towards its current grotesque shape. The major publisher, with its bulk copies sold through bulk stores, large objects with EAN-numbers, whose evolution Striphas details, precisely shipped all over the world, oppressively priced, absurdly well-guarded, at amazing cost in money, trees, labour, industrial production and design, pollution and planetary stress, has constructed a boggling chain of transport and management… to deliver the object but not the goods.

In the late '80s representatives from the chains' marketing departments sat in on editorial meetings. The vote of the marketing department or an editorial consultant was equal to the vote of a senior editor. The chains' demand for ever-increasing sales, if unmet, resulted in a writer's next book either going out under a pseudonym (the writer having to begin to establish a reputation, from scratch, with a new body of work), or not being bought by that publisher at all.

(Full disclosure: I have friends and acquaintance whose careers and occupations and, sometimes, health, have been ended by chains' decisions not to carry any more of their titles and by publishers' consequent decisions not to acquire more titles from them. Sometimes their earlier titles had been doomed by the same chains' lack of publicity and shelf-time, or overlap between the return-and re-order cycles.)

Refusing to print certain books is not beside Striphas's point about copyright law being used for cultural suppression; it is an earlier exemplar of his point about the book trade evolving in order to keep increasing sales and profits. It was as maximum-profit-driven a decision as Barnes and Nobles sliding book-display panels and as Harry Potter's global roll-out date.

If the advent of e-publishing means that publishers can lock down the reader's ability to control the text after "buying" it, the previous deals between publishers and chains locked down readers' content choices before those choices could even be made.

There is no prohibition anywhere against corporate censorship.

However, desiring only blockbuster-level profit and sales-driven deals between chains and major publishers has mummified a lot of Anglo-American fiction.

Profit-level requirements have led to endless series, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later installments may be. (See Dune–everything after Children of Dune, which is when the original conception became the Herbert family's, and Bantam/Doubleday's, bread and butter and cheese and jam.)

They have led to branding by the author's name, held to guarantee readership no matter how thin or uninteresting the later volumes may be. In James Patterson's case the only thing done by Patterson is the outline and the editing of the final text. He can no longer actually write the books, there being too many to be published before the market is saturated.

Brand names not to be trusted: Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Jack Higgins, Ken Follett – who would have thought James Michener to be a precursor–all began with one book of fair average quality or better, and have continued to pump air or sludge long after the well ran out of water; John Grisham's Bleachers is so stereotyped and derivative that reading the first 30 pages is like eating the packet instead of the cornflakes. The Saxon Shore, by Jack Whyte, was clearly sold on 3 chapters and an outline...

These novels contain no factuality, such as Oprah's Book Club espouses (and which Striphas does a sterling job of explicating); no truth of imaginative insight such as Flaubert used to illuminate Madame Bovary. (45 years after Tolkien, epic fantasy–Sara Douglass, Steven Erikson–is now written for people addicted to a particular story-arc. In that it is the counterpart of the romance novel. Both genres now function as narcotics, rather than stimulants.) It could be said that in their attempt to make novels as mass entertainment (which they never were, movies were that) the major publishers have attempted to empty them of all content. Isn't the advice to writers to explain which of the publisher's previous releases his/her book most resembles and to pitch his/her manuscript to the editor of that book?

The last thirty years of print have been defined by the paradox of booksellers deciding what major publishers will publish; the late age of print is defined by the paradox of publishers deciding that the 2nd-hand book trade will end–and being able to enforce that decision technologically.

But, through fundamentally misunderstanding books, confusing the object with the process of conceiving and constructing the text, what the major publishers have done is made the e-book necessary to writers. New publishers, sick of corporate control, are working on new web-publishing software and formats. Sites like Smashwords are open to any writer.

Killing the mid-list turned a great many acceptable popular, non-literary writers into the kind of new brand that's good to begin with and then, once the market for the brand is established, lowers the quality and raises the price. (The loss of quality is not necessarily intended by writers; but how many very good books can you write, one after another, in quick succession? The first time I came across the word potboiler was in a book on Joseph Conrad.)

Killing the mid-list told all writers that continuously increasing sales (the percentage of increase specified) leading to blockbuster books was the only way to a future in writing.

Killing the mid-list meant a great many other writers couldn't get published at all, or, if they did manage to sell a book, would be paid about enough to run a small household for 2 weeks.

No wonder writers will take to the web. And for a while the web will solve some problems.

In the short term, for everybody else–the cost of e-readers will exclude a lot of readers; reading onscreen itself will exclude a lot of the old, who read a lot; eastern and southern Asia will make pirated works available on pirated devices.

Striphas's 3 main points are good and well made, as far as they go. The flaw in the book, and I found it a crippling one, was his decision to pull up short at the edge of the other half of an indivisible subject.

But there is one more point that Striphas makes.

His fourth and final argument is that the lockdown capacity of e-books may come to prevent "cultural politics" (such as embodied in the pirate works, if you envisage them as disputing the cultural hegemony of the originals' copyright holders).

The State of Victoria has tried to do this with respect to graffiti: to buy spray-paint you need a builder's (contractor's) note/purchase order. If large corporations succeed in controlling the web, the end of unauthorized, web-based works and cultural disputation may well be the future.

This situation is implicit in the capacity of the technology (see the recent Amazon Fail matter, for example). Striphas probably outlines something of the truth of the future. However, with so many of us struggling to keep our homes/jobs/health-insurance or health-care, these possibilities are too remote to get the attention they might turn out to have needed.

And then again, as Bobby Sands once pointed out, people will write in shit if they have to.

==

1 – Striphas argues that superstores are selling a new image of bookselling, rather than a new type of book, and that the old image, where sales depended on the virtue of a particular book, is what is being superseded.

I have worked in libraries, and have found some new books to be less useful than their titles would suggest: though it is better now, given to chapter outlines and more flow (the "global warming" title), when they began (e.g. "Windows 95" title), the For Dummies series chopped its subjects into innumerable small bits, leading to cul de sacs of frustration and confusion; for learning about computers For Dummies was noticeably inferior to the Teach Yourself Visually series. But people ask for For Dummies and The Complete Idiot's Guide. When people wanted to learn how to operate Windows and PCs, I had to hand-sell Teach Yourself Visually, as it were.

I suspect the difference was the result of advertising, as it turned out to be in the case of Ingles Sin Barreras and Rosetta Stone. Pimsleur's and the other language-learning packages are no worse than these, but are not advertised on radio and TV.

In this sense Striphas is right–sales do not depend on the virtue of even the non-fiction book in question, but on how thoroughly advertising has trained people to ask for the series. Another case of branding.