In an enviable example of lucid academic writing, Jenny Lee, a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, offers an essay on the mystique of the printed book and its demise in the face of digitization called "Beyond Gatekeeping: Publishing in an Era of Information Overload."
The essay was published a few months ago on the site The Book & The Computer, but came to my attention only today thanks to a colleague. The author touches on several topics near and dear to me, most aptly the bias against the more accessible publishing culture made possible by technologies like desktop publishing and the Internet:
The passion invested in the defense of "the book" against the forces
of consumer capitalism -- or, as an older discourse would have it, the
defense of "culture" against "commerce" -- suggests that more is at
stake than the fate of a mere collection of pages printed on both sides
and bound inside a cover. Often it seems the defenders of the book are
invoking its mystique to mask a more self-interested crusade: a battle
to protect a peculiarly rarefied conception of the public sphere.
It is as if they hanker for the time when books and their authors,
with publishers as their gatekeepers, could set the terms of public
debate, often pursuing sectional interests in the guise of promoting
universal (or at least national) goals. This is neither a worthy cause
nor, ultimately, a winnable one. Books today are only part of a vast,
deep and diverse matrix of cultural products. They are an important
part of that matrix, but their centrality can no longer be taken for
granted.
The essay deserves a more thoughtful response than I am probably capable of delivering, but one of the elements I admire in this piece is its sketch of the tension between the idea of the book and the physical reality, the "book-like objects" as she describes them. In examining the 'value proposition' of the book as a medium, she notes two qualities:
- "the
amount of human thought, skill and sheer hard work invested in each
title"
- "the fact that the production of books
operates on a slower rhythm and a longer time-scale than the jump-cut,
day-to-day busyness of the electronic media"
As someone who has had to summarize the value proposition of Lulu in a long line of PowerPoint presentations, pamphlets, and sets of talking points, I had to laugh when I saw this because, while true, these virtues stand in direct opposition to those offered by our mad little corner of the publishing world, where the current Lulu tagline boasts publishing that is "fast, free, and easy."
Lee's real topic, of course, is the mystique of the book, the contrived nature of which she is well aware. She goes on to note some of the conditions that made the labor intensive process of publishing books possible in the first place, as well as the radical changes to that process brought about by the disintegration of formal editing and typesetting training (another of my favorite topics) and the economic pressures brought to bear by the current publishing system. "At present," Lee notes wryly, "editing books is one of the lowest-paid forms of
intellectual labor around, perhaps exceeded only by the work of writing
them."
If you take a moment to poke around The Book & The Computer site, be sure to read the piece by Gabriel Zaid (author of So Many Books) as well, titled "Organized Not to Read."
