Differences & Repetitions

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

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.

Before getting down to business with the TOC for the latest issue of Culture Machine, I thought I’d put in a plug for Gary Hall’s latest effort. It’s called Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (U of MN Press, 2008). The text is something of a manifesto for why Gary does what he does as editor of Culture Machine. It’s also so much more. I’d recommend the book highly to anyone navigating their way through the academy and its atavistic publishing apparatus.

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We are pleased to announce a new edition of the open-access journal
Culture Machine:

CULTURE MACHINE 10 (2009)
http://www.culturemachine.net

PIRATE PHILOSOPHY
Tenth Anniversary Issue, edited by Gary Hall

This tenth anniversary issue of Culture Machine explores how the development of various forms of digital culture and ‘internet piracy’ is affecting notions of authorship, intellectual property, copyright law, publication, attribution, citation, accreditation, fair use, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet. Contributors address the theme of piracy in the content and/or by playing provocatively with the form of their texts.

The ‘Pirate Philosophy’ issue features:

• Gary Hall, ‘Pirate Philosophy (Version 1.0): Open Access, Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media’
• Adrian Johns, ‘Piracy as a Business Force’
• Jonas Andersson, ‘For the Good of the Net: The Pirate Bay as a Strategic Sovereign’
• Don Joyce, Negativland, ‘Vapor Music’
• Kembrew McLeod, ‘Crashing the Spectacle: A Forgotten History of Digital Sampling, Infringement, Copyright Liberation and the End of Recorded Music’
• Alexander R. Galloway, ‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’
• Mark Amerika, ‘Source Material Everywhere: The Alfred North Whitehead Remix’
• Gary Hall, Clare Birchall and Pete Woodbridge, ‘Liquid Theory TV’
• Gary Hall and Clare Birchall, ‘New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader’

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ABOUT CULTURE MACHINE

The Culture Machine journal publishes new work from both established figures and up-and-coming writers. It is fully refereed, and has an International Advisory Board which includes Geoffrey Bennington, Robert Bernasconi, Sue Golding, Lawrence Grossberg, Peggy Kamuf, Alphonso Lingis, Meaghan Morris, Paul Patton, Mark Poster, Avital Ronell, Nicholas Royle and Kenneth Surin.

Culture Machine welcomes original, unpublished submissions on any aspect of culture and theory. All contributions to Culture Machine are refereed anonymously. Anyone with material they wish to submit for publication is invited to contact:

Culture Machine c/o Dave Boothroyd and Gary Hall
e-mail: gary.hall@coventry.ac.uk and d.boothroyd@kent.ac.uk

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at: http://www.culturemachine.net

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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.

Back in October I presented a paper called “Kindle: The New Book Mobile or, the Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling” at the American Studies Association convention in Albuquerque, NM. Before the conference I had posted a working draft of the Kindle piece on the Differences & Repetitions Wiki site, where I received amazing feedback.

Anyway, I’ve been pecking away at the paper some more and have posted the beta version to D&R^W. This one isn’t an outline, in contrast to the previous iteration. Version 2.0 also contains a more substantive conclusion, which incorporates some of the feedback I received on the initial draft.

I’m not looking to crowdsource feedback on the new version of the Kindle paper per se, although as always comments are indeed welcome and can be left right on the worksite. I’ve also included a new feature on all D&R^W pages allowing you to share material easily on Facebook, del.icio.us, Furl, MySpace, and elsewhere.

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.

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.

Last May I posted a short snippet of a paper I was working on to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. It was called “Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing.” The title summarizes the principal focus of the piece. Essentially I wanted to ask: why hasn’t the field of cultural studies given its instruments of scholarly communication–journals especially–more critical scrutiny?

I was encouraged by the many comments and questions I received in response to the two pairs of paragraphs and tables that I had posted online. I kept plugging away at “Acknowledged Goods” into the summer and finished a draft sometime in late June. I’ve been meaning to post the completed piece to D&R^W, but unfortunately other responsibilities have gotten in the way.

Until now, that is. I’ve finally managed to get “Acknowledged Goods” properly formatted for the wiki, so at long last you can read the whole essay by clicking here. Since this is a longer and much more nuanced version of the work I posted back in May, I’m still very interested in hearing your feedback. Indeed, “Acknowledged Goods” remains a work in progress, so your comments, questions, and concerns will only help as I keep tweaking the piece.

I hope that you enjoy “Acknowledged Goods” and, more important, that it spurs you to action. Academic journal publishing is at a critical crossroads right now, and cultural studies ought to weigh in on its present and future directions.

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.

Happy birthday, photocopier! You’re 70 years old today. For more on the happy occasion, you can check out this story in Wired magazine:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayintech_1022

Differences and repetitions indeed!