Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control: Free download available. Striphas argues that print is in a “late” age, not ending but analogous to late capitalism. He argues that mass print culture, despite assumptions to the contrary, has always been about consumption and consumerism—early PR genius Edward Bernays was hired by booksellers to convince people to put bookshelves into their houses, for example, on the theory that empty shelves would then be filled. He asks whether the fetishization of the physical book (of which I am certainly most guilty) is predicated on the exploitation of various types of labor used to produce that book, though there are also labor questions bound up in the production of intangibles—not even the authors, but the catalogers etc.

There are chapters on e-books (whose rise offers new prospects of satisfying publishers’ long-unfulfilled desire to stop the dastardly free riding of book-borrowers and used booksellers; in 1931, they ran a contest to coin a disparaging term for people who borrow books; the winner was “book sneak”), big box stores (arguing that it’s more complicated and local than “big boxes killed independents”), Oprah’s book club (tying it to Janice Radway’s study of the functions of romance reading and the ability to make time/space for reading), and the internationalization of Harry Potter, from security measures taken against early release to unauthorized variants. (On the last: “Bricolage, indigenization, parody, and other forms of appropriation are frequently perceived by Western journalists, intellectual property rights holders, and others to be insufciently or inappropriately transfgurative acts. This perception, in turn, places those who have assumed the task of development in an impossible position. On the one hand, they’re charged with repeating foreign values, styles, and culture, while, on the other, they are condemned for having done so under existing economic and infrastructural conditions. Despite their complaints, Western authorities tend not to admit their part—our part—in both creating and sustaining the conditions leading to book piracy and other forms of intellectual property piracy on the world scene.”) Plus there are a lot of grace notes—I didn’t know that the last digit of the ISBN is a check digit, the decimal equivalent of a binary checksum, an elegant way of guarding against mistakes, including transpositions, in recording the number.

Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright: Uses videotape to talk about the materiality of copies and the ideology of copyright. Some nice stuff: Early video sales were tapes that people wanted to watch privately (porn) or repeatedly (workouts), so “the self-consciousness many users would have felt about exercising in public aerobics classes may have paralleled the embarrassment many would have felt in adult theaters; thus body shame may have been central to home video’s early success”; “in considering technological reproduction, we must rethink issues of fidelity and authenticity to move away from conceptions of an original performance that precedes recording. Rather, fidelity and authenticity are a ruse, an ideology to promote newer and more expensive formats. Infidelity is the marker of the analog amateur. Bootleggers are promiscuous and polyamorous.” I really liked his discussion of poor tape quality as a sign of specialness. Unauthorized taping is often the only way to watch programs with their original musical cues, given TV licensing woes, and low quality signifies a certain type of authenticity—“You know this is the stuff you weren’t meant to see simply because the image quality is so bad,” one source says. 

There's a useful history of Vanderbilt's Video News Archive and how it fit into debates over media bias and copyright reform. Case studies of Superstar, the film about Karen Carpenter, and of women’s video chain letters are also of interest. cesperanza might particularly appreciate the argument about “the ways in which analog video—in particular its inherent technical flaws—allows for technologically specific representations of female experience,” especially in regards to the California Crew’s Pressure. Sadly, though Hilderbrand cites Henry Jenkins, he only glancingly mentions vidding, in the afterword on internet distribution of clips. He doesn’t seem to fully appreciate the ways in which shared works can help form communities; in introducing one of the video chain letters in which one teenaged female character gives another a mix tape, he writes, “[t]he potential for a tape exchange to initiate interpersonal communication—and even friendship—coincidentally reflects the mission of the Joanie 4 Jackie video chainletter project, through which this short circulated …” (emphasis added). But really, where’s the coincidence?

ETA: see lovely links from crypto.

Farhad Manjoo, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society: Manjoo has compelling stories to tell—how the Swift Boat Veterans defamed John Kerry, how theories that the 2004 elections were stolen persist—and persuasive science backing up his arguments that we mostly believe the facts we want to believe. The book is ultimately defeated, however, by two related things: First, despite the title, Manjoo has no good advice for dealing with this problem; one could infer that “maintain a healthy skepticism about claims that support your side” could help, but that’s not exactly attacking the problem at its core, especially since the real damage occurs when we’re certain that we’re perceiving reality absolutely unvarnished. Second, implicit throughout (and often all but explicit) is the idea that, before the internet, when there were few mass media sources of information, we (in the US; he doesn’t cover elsewhere) got the Truth. When in fact, because of the psychological phenomena Manjoo covers and the nature of power, what we got was what a bunch of white men thought was the truth. What would Malcolm X say to the claim that Walter Cronkite was the voice of neutrality? What about Betty Friedan, or Angela Davis? The line “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on” is over a hundred and fifty years old; Manjoo claims that the internet makes things worse because now everyone can find an outlet for/apparent confirmation of their own wacky theories, but never persuasively makes the case that it was better for only powerful white men to get mainstream confirmation of their wacky theories.