In late 2005, I had a chance conversation in a bookstore during which a complete stranger recommended that I read The Short Version by Stan Persky. I picked up a copy, intrigued by the promise of Persky’s articulate outline of Richard Rorty’s thought.
The book sat on the shelf, awaiting my attention, for three years.
Last week the mood finally struck. It was a good recommendation: not only was the piece on Rorty one of the best 15-page outlines of Pragmatism (and its implications for liberal politics) that I’ve read; The Short Version is a delightful personal survey of a number of topics from Constantine Cavafy to ancient mythology to teaching philosophy to the history of Berlin. All of these topics are discretely handled but finely interwoven by the author’s clear-headed humanism and keen intelligence. It is also a fabulous incentive to read some of those books about which Persky writes about so enthusiastically.
Winter's Night: Good
Winter's Night: Evil
One of those authors is Italo Calvino. So I have now started reading If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler. I own a Vintage UK edition, which I picked up in London a couple of years ago, knowing I would otherwise have to suffer the appalling cover and intermittent availability of the Key Porter edition here in Canada.
It has sat on the shelf, awaiting my attention, for two years.
You may begin to notice notice a pattern here.
The behaviours that led to both of these books taking up space in my apartment for months on end, exercising little function except taunting me with their unreadness, were responses to scarcity. Even the Calvino decision — apparently a matter of aesthetics — was driven by scarcity. I was unable to get an attractive trade paperback in Canada: so pick it up in London.
One of the things that book-buyers do is accumulate books during phases of interest, on whims of passing fancy, or with some future plan in mind, even if they aren’t going to start reading them immediately. Why? Because you never know when (or if) you’re going to see this book again — whether the store will carry it, whether another customer will have bought it. Whether you’ll even remember what book it was — and whether you’ll be able to find it among the wealth of other books. Sometimes items are scarce because they have to wind their way through production processes that may not scale well for — for example — deep backlist articles. Sometimes they are scarce because of the abundance of competing, surrounding products.
This is something that Kevin Drum has been thinking about recently:
In the past, I’d go to the bookstore and buy several books at a time. Naturally I meant to read all of them, and just as naturally, I didn’t. Another book would catch my eye before I’d finished them all, a review book would come in the mail, I’d get a few books for Christmas, etc. etc. The upshot is that some of the books would fall to the bottom of the pile and never get read.
With the Kindle, though, there’s no pile. When I finish a book, all I have to do is decide at that moment what I feel like reading next. Ten minutes later I have it. I don’t know for sure if this is good or bad in the long run, but it’s certainly different.
It’s the same, of course, for music. All that time and energy you would expend trying to remind yourself about rare and essential releases that you would simply have to purchase should you ever find them. That copy of Joe Cocker’s epic Mad Dogs & Englishmen double-album, surely one of the finest documents of a drugs-&-booze-fueled transcontinental rock ‘n’ roll odyssey since Lewis and Clark. Pete LaRoca’s meditative hard-bop jazz classic Basra (which, apparently, was on the cusp of a Rudy Van Gelder-remastered rerelease in 2003 only to be yanked when LaRoca hated the idea of being associated with the Iraq war). RZA’s bizarre and graceful hip-hop score to Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, only available as an astonishingly expensive import from Japan. The follow-on activities from this kind of thing were exhausting: making lists; transferring them to whatever technology (notebooks? spreadsheets? Palm Pilot?) were most current; remembering to print the damn things out and carry them around with you in case you happened to stop by somewhere that might carry them. Indeed — planning and preparing to visit a store. And then the hours spent poring through their inventory like a reference librarian.
Not much fun.
Needless to say, all of this activity — the effort required to make a purchase — accords a higher value to the product itself, leading to hoarding. That’s just one way in which your money (and time) are wasted by the economies of cultural scarcity. Among others: the capital depreciation, the obvious physical degradation (I’m looking at you, crappy yellow-edged UK trade paperbacks), the fact that your current assessment of how much you want something may not efficiently estimate the future return on your investment, and the massive opportunity cost when an apartment full of books prevents you from installing a perfectly good wine refrigerator or vintage pinball machine.
I for one will be happy when this is behind us. When everything is always available, everywhere, and you can quickly tag books, music, or anything else for future purchase (without fear of there being obstacles), where is the incentive to fill your living space with stuff that you may one day read? Couldn’t you make better use of all that space?
Who would have expected that the dusty old Globe & Mail would be the producer of such a great podcast on digital media’s impact on business and culture? (Hint: not me.)
Now 16 episodes long, the series has seen reporters Matt Hartley and Ivor Tossell interview Shawn Fanning on Napster’s impact, Michael Geist on copyright in Canada, Matt Mason on “the pirate’s dilemma”, Mike Lee from Rogers Communications on net neutrality, and so many others.
The most compelling thing so far for me has been the insight the series has provided into what industry insiders were and are thinking as the ground shifts beneath them.
An interesting trend with digital distribution is how cultural objects are not simply being reshaped into digital — presumably streamlined — versions of their content. Instead they are exploding and reforming as fairly complicated new ‘clusters’ of component parts.
The rebirth of cover art
Take the reappearance of liner notes for albums. During the initial stages of the MP3 revolution, liner notes and cover art seemed like the most disposable part of the package. In part that’s because the scene was so unpleasantly grungy: underground, tarnished with illegitimacy, and not very easy to use. Most users wouldn’t have that many songs; those that they did have might be of dubious provenance, and organized rather poorly in some system of directories — perhaps by the P2P software by which you obtained them. Assemble a large library, and you’re knocking up against the capacity of your hard drive (and the width of the pipe through which you obtained your music). You probably don’t want to crowd that out with large cover art — and even if you did, what use would it be to you?
Then came the iTunes Music Store: slick, legit, intuitive. The average user’s library was likely to consist of far more songs than it might have a few years ago, and all of a sudden you need something to help you navigate, and to prompt the impulsive listen. The hard drive on your current machine was significantly larger than it was a couple of years ago. And Apple needed something to give it the stamp of legitimacy to separate it from unpleasant competitor services (legal or otherwise).
Re-enter cover art.
Liner notes are similarly making a comeback, presumably for a comparably complex matrix of reasons. They take advantage of iTunes’ ability to store and display PDF files. Which is, by the way, criminally under-utilized: why doesn’t the New Yorker have an iTunes store from which I can download articles for 99 cents each?
Crowdsourcing cover art
Right now, digital covers and liner notes are still soft versions of what had accompanied the physical object some years ago. But that’s beginning to change.
As Walters points out, these are in the spirit of other recentdesignremixes. His rationale is very clear:
The problem was that almost all of the Wu-Tang album art was horrible (ODB’s two albums being the only real exceptions) — no offense to the original designers, but as iconic as they might be they’re looking pretty dated these days.
Those are of course subjective opinions (though I’m inclined to agree, in spite of some nostalgia for Chambers and Cuban Linx). But that’s exactly the point: it isn’t terribly important why he wants to redesign classic Wu albums in the spirit of Blue Note; all that matters is that it helps him enjoy the material more. Looking at Walters’ work, I think I might have the same reaction. I’m certainly going to try it out.
Don’t judge a cover by its book
As we move away from cultural materials manifesting themselves solely in physical form, our expectations as to what exactly constitutes a ‘book’ or ‘album’ itself is obviously going to change. New reading devices will shape what is acceptable, or appropriate, in terms of raw content. The MP3 made the single the default commercial unit of music for the first time in decades.
But that doesn’t mean that the ancillary materials around these works no longer have a place. Indeed, it may augment the importance of those materials. On the one hand, having communally recognized album art will help me show off my record collection when friends are over and browsing my collection via my gorgeous (and at this point theoretical) touchwall interface.
On the other hand, having album art that speaks to an aspect of the music that’s particularly appealing to me — or that shades my appreciation of it in an unexpected or unfamiliar manner — may significantly increase my enjoyment of it.
Monetizing ancillary products
There’s also a juicy financial incentive, both from the crowdsourced and top-down content creation models.
Why wouldn’t artists crowdsource their album art, provide a voting interface for fans, and make alternative versions available for download from their websites? The publicity implications — the permission marketing — are obvious.
There is somegreatwork being done in book cover design at the moment. There a great deal of value embedded in it — in the dialogue in which it engages with both the contents of the book and the visual culture within which it exists. Why don’t publishers make book covers available for posters, T-shirts, and the like, via a one-click interface? They’ve already commissioned the art. Digital distribution costs are next to nothing to make the design available to third-party services like Cafe Press or Threadless. Pay a bit more to the designer for the rights to reproduce the work in different media; consumers will engage in a free marketing campaign on your behalf.
Consumers define the sum of the parts, not distributors
Cultural works are always imperfectly contained explosions of component parts — whether they are purely physical aspects or an assemblage of expectations and impressions that consumers bring to their decision to experience a book, film, or album.
Publishers and other distributors of content need to think about how to monetize every aspect of a cultural work that has value of its own. They need to think of themselves as a ‘hub’ for all cultural goings-on associated with a piece of content. That’s the only way to guarantee themselves a role in this new world.
Digital distribution offers a myriad of ways to re-imagine each of component parts. Cultural signifiers change so fast attach themselves with such promiscuity, and the costs to distribute pieces are so low, that book covers, pieces of music, and film posters, can float free and attach themselves to whatever uses consumers can imagine for them.
I’m sure Walter Benjamin wrote something about this. Maybe I’ll go read about it — if I like the look of one of the covers.
LibraryThing has a wonderful “local” functionality which enables users to indicate their favourite bookstores and libraries — the places where books as physical objects can be found, acquired, purchased.
But why not allow users to indicate their favourite public places to read? Favourite cafes, parks, beaches, hotel lobbies, bus shelters. These are the places at which the various social and personal functions of books are best served — whether those be isolation or flirtation, communication or solitude.
What does it mean as we move away from cultural objects as objects — things — and towards cultural objects as nexuses of cultural and social moments?
That’s all true at a conceptual level, but has implications for how we live with these objects. When you are free from dealing with books primarily as stuff requiring storage space, you can start to organize them according to aesthetics or other whims and fancies.
For all of our “cultural objects”, we should start to think about how our world is (or should be) organized around their cultural purposes — not their physicality.
At last month’s BookNet Canada Technology conference, DailyLit founder Susan Danziger and BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn both touched on the social utility books have for flirting — Tamblyn coining the term “Date Repellent Mode” to describe the current state of eBook devices (skip to 10:02 if you don’t want to watch the entire — wonderful — presentation).
We need to become better at recognizing the social and personal spaces that our cultural objects serve, rather than the physical spaces that were previously the most manifest — and challenging — aspect of their existence. When that takes place, we will have an ecology of business and services around those objects that serves them all the better. And, most probably, better books too. Let’s stop making the best ideas for the physical form they have to inhabit, and concentrate simply on the best ideas. In the best places.
In late 2005, I had a chance conversation in a bookstore during which a complete stranger recommended that I read The Short Version by Stan Persky. I picked up a copy, intrigued by the promise of Persky’s articulate outline of Richard Rorty’s thought.
