Kindle : Amazon :: iPad : Apple :: Nook : B&N :: Codex : ?????

The book isn't obsolete.  I find myself wondering what would happen now if we only had eBooks and someone had just discovered how to turn paper writings from scrolls to bound volumes.  What would happen?  (Aside: Coincidentally, eBooks, at least on iOS, recently gained the ability to mock scrolls.)

If a single business entity had exclusive rights to binding books, what would the commercials look like?  What's the sales pitch?  We'd see the same beautiful people at the beach, this time with some person happily reading their book as their kid spills ocean water on the person reading a Kindle next to them.  We'd see someone reading through an airplane takeoff after seeing an iPad user scolded by an air steward.  We'd see someone lending a book to someone else for easy reading.  We'd see people in parks, or hiking, or in blackouts still reading while others were out of luck.

I'm not arguing that books are better than eBook readers.  I'm saying that the format is marketable, and that there's nobody with a vested interest to champion them.  For whatever reason, nobody's hiring a Billy Mays equivalent for the codex the way they are for eBook readers.  Because the format's in the public domain, there's no incredibly vested interest.

Beyond consumers (who buy, not market), who might change this?  Honestly, there are only two sources, I think.  One is the paper mill, but I don't know that book paper is the biggest moneymaker right now.  Where does our paper come from anyway?  The other is the big book store, but that's down to essentially Barnes and Noble, right?  And they have a truly vested interest in pushing Nooks and eBooks now.  I guess book clubs might be another source, but how much growth could they expect, best case?  Probably not worth the marketing cash.

And obviously there are authors, yet authors aren't really hurt if people buy eBooks instead of codices.  In fact, used sales (remember when the Authors' Guild (?) sued Amazon over selling used books next to new?) mean they get paid less often with printed pages than eBooks, at least legally.

(Which brings me back to asking why nobody lends their Kindle.  Illegal?  I think it might be, but it's easier to share an entire library of books now than it used to be, not harder, yet the expensive hardware seems to make lending a much less frequent activity.)

I don't know who would champion books, but I do know I haven't seen an advert from them recently.  In fact, the only place I experience adverts for books at all in the mainstream media is on talk radio (sports) and on ABC's Castle, both from publishing houses/authors who probably don't really care which format you use.  Strange that a show about a book author would bring in book readers, though apparently the fictitious author has ghostwriters who have written some real world bestsellers.

I suppose I should realize that the free market suggests that the codex still has more of the market than it should right now simply from inertia, and that once its use drops below a sort of natural threshold, some entity will start marketing it to make the money left on the table.  I just wish they'd start marketing now to slow the descent.  But I clearly have my biases.

Heterotopia? No, just another example of industrialization

Slate has an excellent article on fast food as manufacturing that clearly links industrialization and manufacturing with a popular notion of Foucault's heterotopias.

Which is to say, Starbucks is less heterotopia and more factory. McDonald's is more about the rise of craft and the fall of art than the creation of unsituated space.

Those taking Baudrillard on Disney and extending to fast food, malls, etc might need to rethink their views on hegemony.

From Foucault:

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. ...
In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc.
...
But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

I'm not sure I see that quite as clearly in Disneyland. He doesn't even touch capitalism or hats of cash until near the end.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

I'll reread Baudrillard. It's been a few years.

About, not through

Hey, digital media-ists: Remember that your goal is not to study communication performed through digital media.  It's to view what communication reveals about those media.  Let your cultural studies emerge (ha) out the other side, not on the way in.