The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control

The Late Age of Print

The Late Age of Print

EVERYDAY BOOK CULTURE

FROM CONSUMERISM TO CONTROL

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York  Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2009 Columbia University Press

Paperback edition, 2011

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51964-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Striphas, Theodore G.

The late age of print : everyday book culture from consumerism to control / Ted Striphas.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14814-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-14815-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Book industries and trade—United States. 2. Books and reading—United States. 3. Publishers and publishing—United States. 5. Electronic publishing—United States. 6. Internet bookstores—United States. I. Title.

Z471.S85 2009

381′.45002—dc22

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Designed by Lisa Hamm

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Phaedra

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Late Age of Print

Bottom Lines

Edges

Sites

1  E-Books and the Digital Future

A Book by Any Other Name

Shelf Life

Book Sneaks

Disappearing Digits

A Different Story to Tell

2 The Big-Box Bookstore Blues

Chain Reactions?

Thoroughly Modern Bookselling

Things to Do with Big-Box Bookstores

History’s Folds

3 Bringing Bookland Online

The Tragedy of the Book Industry

Encoding/Decoding—Sort of

A Political Economy of Commodity Codes

The Remarkable Unremarkable

4 Literature as Life on Oprah’s Book Club

O®

No Dictionary Required

It’s More About Life

A Million Little Corrections

An Intractable Alchemy

5 Harry Potter and the Culture of the Copy

Securing Harry Potter

Pirating Potter

He-Who-Must-Be-Named

Conclusion: From Consumerism to Control

On the Verge

From Heyday to History and Beyond

Notes

Index

Preface to the Paperback Edition

No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.

—Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com

THE CLOTH EDITION of The Late Age of Print appeared a little less than two years ago, and already book culture looks noticeably different. The Barnes & Noble bookstore chain is currently fighting off a hostile takeover. Borders, the other leading big-box bookseller in the United States, is hanging on by a financial thread. Oprah Winfrey announced that the 2010–2011 season of The Oprah Winfrey Show will be her last, a decision that will likely bring an end to her book club; however, her mission to get the whole country reading again may continue with the One Book, One Twitter program, which promises to get a zillion people all reading and talking about books worldwide—albeit in installments of 140 characters or less.¹ Harry Potter remains a cultural icon, to be sure, and his attorneys remain amply occupied both initiating and responding to intellectual property infringement suits. The bestselling book series seems to be settling comfortably into its retirement, though, initially as a movie franchise and more recently as a theme park ride in Florida. Meanwhile, new sensations have emerged on the book scene, chief among them Stephenie Meyer’s vampire series for young adults, Twilight, as well as all the Readers, Kindles, Nooks, iPads, and other electronic devices that promise to thrust reading headlong into the digital age—assuming, of course, they’re not eclipsed by the long shadow of Google.

These and other shifts underscore the persistent unevenness, or dynamism, of contemporary book culture, which is one of the principal themes I explore in The Late Age of Print. Collectively, they suggest that books—and here I’m referring to printed, paper ones, or what some have lately taken to calling p-books—remain important artifacts in today’s world, even if their social meanings, preferred uses, and sense of prestige seem to be called into question as never before. Certain interested parties even go so far as to suggest that the era of printed books is nearing its end. They justify their claims by suggesting that these items may exist in the present day, yet for all practical purposes they’re not of the present day. It’s time to move on, they say. These false prophets fail to acknowledge how this strange temporal condition is hardly unique to our own time. In fact, it’s one of the most enduring attributes of printed books in history.

Since their first appearance in the West more than five hundred years ago, printed books have been temporally unsettled, and unsettling. Bucking the conventional wisdom that says printing was a quintessentially modern achievement, the cultural studies scholar James Carey observes that the book was the culminating event in medieval culture before it was the first invention of the modern world…. The printed book… is in the first instance an agent of the continuity of medieval culture rather than its rupture.² This is one of the strange qualities I try to put my finger on in the pages that follow; namely, that printed books always seem to be both in and out of sync with the present—whenever the present may be.

What exactly does it mean, then, to think about these objects as agents of continuity, or as technologies disposed to linking together past and present? The specific turn of phrase may be Carey’s, but the idea behind it belongs to the Canadian economic historian turned communication theorist, Harold Adams Innis. Throughout his career, Innis obsessed about staples—not the kind you use to fasten together pieces of paper, thankfully, but rather the raw materials that are vital to human well-being. These he saw as the building blocks of civilization, for the pursuit of them led otherwise disparate peoples to engage in extraordinary acts of coordination, cooperation, and social integration. But staples also had something like the opposite effect as well. Historically, the depletion of key resources in one locale has tended to compel people to go searching for them elsewhere, resulting in territorial expansion and, in more extreme cases, conquest. Two of Innis’s earliest books—one on beaver fur, the other on codfish—helped him to recognize later in his career that the category staple could include items beyond the basic stock of shelter, nourishment, and clothing.³ Perhaps his most important insight was that communication was a staple, and that communication technologies therefore constituted a fundamental part of the material means by which societies created, maintained, repaired, transformed, and sometimes even destroyed themselves.

A series of detailed studies of both ancient and contemporary civilizations—from Babylon and Byzantium to Britain and beyond—helped Innis refine his understanding of communication. He began by distinguishing between two major types of communication technologies. The first of these, consisting of durable materials such as parchment, clay, and stone, facilitate the persistence of messages across time, and thus the endurance of tradition and social custom. The other type, consisting of lighter, less sturdy materials such as newsprint, celluloid film, and transistors, facilitate the extension of messages across space, and thus the administration of territories inhabited by distant populations.⁴ The former set of materials have since come to be known as time-binding technologies, while the latter are commonly referred to as space-binding. The second and more controversial refinement Innis made to his communication-as-staple thesis concerned the ratio of these technologies that a society maintained. A stable society is dependent on an appreciation of a proper balance between the concepts of space and time, writes Innis in The Bias Of Communication.⁵ An over-emphasis on time-binding technologies could lead to insular groupings in which tradition triumphs over innovation. A surfeit of space-binding technologies, on the other hand, could contribute to sprawling civilizations that are dismissive of custom and thus neurotic about maintaining social and political control.

There’s much to criticize in Innis’s theory of the role of communication in history. It’s certainly open to the charge of technological determinism, despite his protests to the contrary.⁶ There’s also some confusion over which of the categories—time-or space-binding—specific communication technologies belong to. In one place radio seems to be an example of a time-binding medium, for example, but elsewhere it’s clearly spacebinding.⁷ Moreover, like many intellectuals who came of age in the first half of the twentieth century, Innis’s concern for the rise and fall of civilizations emerged against the backdrop of two grisly World Wars, the terrifying effects of the atomic bomb, and ultimately the unshakable feeling that modern Western civilization was on the verge of collapse. This isn’t a fault of the work per se, but it infuses Innis’s writings with an epic sweep, negative tone, and sense of gravity that have fallen out of favor today.

Having said that, you don’t have to buy fully into Innis’s thesis to accept that communication technologies have something to do with the well-being of societies, particularly as they’re configured both temporally and spatially. And it’s with this understanding in mind that I want to reflect on the latest surge of interest in e-books, as well as the call, issued by some, to abandon p-books in favor of one or more of the latest digital reading platforms.

Cards on the table, then: I read them, I collect them, I even write them, but honestly, I’m suspicious of printed books and the ways of life that have grown up around them. This isn’t to say that we should give up on p-books, but rather that we ought to hold in check the uncritical, almost cultish reverence some bibliophiles display toward these objects. In the introduction that follows, I make a passing reference to book history’s more sinister side. In retrospect, that suggestive phrase warrants further elaboration. Suffice it to say that so much of the work of the world in the age of the [printed] book has been the exercise of dominion and domination over not only the forces of nature but over other men and women, cultures and societies.⁸ The most gruesome example that I know of is anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the binding of books in human flesh, a practice that persisted from approximately the late eighteenth century to the conclusion of the Second World War. It’s not by accident that the skins involved typically belonged to socially marginal individuals—the indigent, Jews, etc.—and that the owners of these loathsome volumes tended to be medical professionals, ranking members of the German Nazi party, and other persons eager to display their power and authority.⁹

When Carey refers to p-books as agents of continuity, then, he’s essentially acknowledging the roles they’ve played as time-binding technologies. On the whole, they’ve been excellent vessels for storing and preserving knowledge.¹⁰ But what the preceding example shows is that p-books have been implicated in preserving something else as well: customs of excluding, intimidating, defiling, and behaving violently toward those who are perceived as social or economic inferiors. Now, I understand that it’s probably unfair to pass judgment on the vast array of cultures of printed books based on a few practices, let alone one as exceptional as anthropodermic bibliopegy. Still, the latter illustrates the kind of excesses that can and do result when systems of privilege combine with systems of communication to produce monopolies of knowledge, to recall another of Innis’s phrases.¹¹ Societies can overinvest in a given communication technology, or type of technology, in part by conferring disproportionate amounts of credibility, prestige, and influence on the classes of people with whom it’s most closely associated.

Consequently, I’m inclined to welcome the latest generation of commercially available e-readers—conditionally, at any rate. Some, like the Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle, and Barnes & Noble Nook, are dedicated e-book devices. Others, like the Apple iPad, have a broader range of possible uses beyond the reading of digital texts. They all share a common claim to the moniker book, but make no mistake: it’s best not to imagine any of them as time-binding technologies.

Time-binding technologies aren’t only durable; they’re also, relatively speaking, substantial. They persist in time thanks in part to their preponderant physical matter. Innis’s paradigmatic example was the Egyptian pyramids (as bearers of hieroglyphics),¹² but the same holds true for the vast stores of printed books that populate the world’s numerous public and private libraries. Time-binding technologies tend to accumulate—even inundate—giving rise if not to cultural landmarks like pyramids and libraries then at least to more everyday apparatuses that encourage their long-term storage, preservation, and display. Think bookshelves. Now, think about how absurd it sounds to buy or build a bookshelf for a Reader, Kindle, Nook, or iPad—compact mobile devices whose storage systems can accommodate 1,500 e-books or more. The device is manifest, while the digital text withdraws into its innermost recesses. Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach, reports the New York Times. That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form.¹³ What the Times fails to acknowledge is that e-books don’t just herald a loss of opportunities for real-world viral marketing; they also underscore the degree to which, historically, p-books have endured by asserting their physical presence en masse into the world.

All this is just another way of saying that, by and large, digital e-readers are better imagined as space-binding technologies. Remember NuvoMedia’s Rocket eBook? Or the Sony Bookman? How about the SoftBook, or the Everybook? Probably not. And even if you do happen to remember any or all of these e-readers, which were released with much fanfare at various points throughout the 1990s, odds are that you’re not using a single one of them today. It’s doubtful that you really could use one of these devices now even if you wanted to, since most relied on content distribution arrangements and proprietary file formats that haven’t been supported for years. In a word, they’re what the tech-savvy would call bricks. That is, they belong to a group of marginally usable legacy technologies that are as likely to be found in a pile of e-waste as they are in an odd corner of eBay.

Today, as more and more people start banking on the longevity of the latest crop of e-readers, we’d do well to recall that Amazon.com isn’t all that far removed from its early profitability woes; that Apple nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s, and that the health of its savior-CEO Steve Jobs is tenuous; and that some are now beginning to raise serious doubts about Barnes & Noble’s competitive prospects because of its decision to continue pouring money into a costly bricks-and-mortar infrastructure.¹⁴ But the issue here isn’t as simple as the tethering of e-readers to specific corporations whose long-term outlook, like many of those who heralded the e-book revolution in the 1990s, cannot be assured.¹⁵ Companies now routinely digitally rights-manage the e-titles they sell, locking in users by making it well-near impossible for those unskilled in hacking to migrate content onto another company’s device.¹⁶ In the event that Amazon.com went under, for example, the content of your Kindle would essentially be imprisoned there, however much you’d probably want to move it onto a different—more fully functional—machine. You might still be able to visit, but there’d be little hope for parole. The point, then, is that e-books are best imagined neither as totems nor trophies but rather as fragile, transient things. Time definitely isn’t on their side.

Critics usually see this as one of the principal drawbacks of e-books. Indeed, most consider their ephemerality to be an affront to both the authority of words and those responsible for producing them. From Innis’s standpoint, however, the ephemerality of e-books may represent a more positive development. As space-binding technologies, they help to mitigate the lingering effects of printed books’ centuries-long monopoly of knowledge.

They do so by forcing us to confront our unexamined assumptions about the moral, intellectual, and archival worth of paper and print. When Sven Birkerts praises the fixity and indelibility of printed books,¹⁷ for example, he refuses to acknowledge how these are the very same qualities that have led to copious errors insinuating themselves as facts into supposedly definitive texts. Maybe the most amusing (or blasphemous) example I know of is the so-called wicked Bible of 1631, which tempted believers with this stirring rendition of the Seventh Commandment: thou shalt commit adultery.¹⁸ It’s possible to issue corrected editions of p-books, of course, but there’s always a lag. Then again, how likely is it for a reader to want to invest in a brand-new copy of a volume he or she has already purchased simply for the sake of seeing a typo or two get fixed, or a missing word added? Moreover, resetting an entire printed book to accommodate new material is nothing if not an undertaking. The addition of even a few characters can throw off pagination, leading to a cascade of problems in the table of contents, index, and beyond. Fixity and indelibility may form the basis upon which our trust in printed books is built, but these attributes can just as easily endow these objects with an air of integrity they may not fully deserve.

Our cycle of technological innovation and obsolescence is such that e-book devices come and go, as does their content. This is frustrating to anyone who’s ever contemplated buying one of these units, much less owned one. It’s also economically profligate and perhaps environmentally unsustainable.¹⁹ Yet there’s an important upside here, too, in that the flightiness of e-books compensates well for the recalcitrance of printed texts. Digital e-book files are fixed products, but only provisionally so. This allows authors and publishers to correct errors they or others might find, quickly and easily. Plus, thanks to Wi-Fi and 3G cellular technology, which is becoming standard fare on most commercial e-readers, presses can distribute the updates freely to readers, who no longer need to make the fraught decision as to whether to purchase the definitive edition of a text they already own. At least, such was the case with the Kindle edition of Stephen Hunter’s novel I, Sniper, whose title screen embarrassingly read, I, Snipper—the difference, as Wired magazine’s Steven Levy pointed out, between a tale of tough guys who take out human targets … [and] the autobiography of a mohel.²⁰ Simon & Schuster, publisher of the e-book, promptly corrected the error upon learning of it, and Amazon.com made an updated file available to those who’d already bought this seemingly bizarre tale of bullets at the bris.

For Birkerts, printed words possess weight, grandeur, while their electronic counterparts suffer because of their supposed weightlessness.²¹ Could it be, though, that the turgidity of printed words, and hence the paper vessels containing them, quietly persuade us to settle for less authoritative, definitive, and elegant books than we deserve? Grandeur, perhaps. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that complacency follows all too easily in the wake of humankind’s most majestic accomplishments.

The beauty of Innis’s theory lies in his having proposed something like a system of checks and balances, or separation of powers, for communication technologies.²² Achieving the proper balance of time- and space-binding media won’t likely result in a harmonious society. Our world is far too complex for such a simple fix to resolve, say, centuries-old inheritances of racism, or the looming peril of global climate change. Nevertheless, a well-functioning communication system ought to include measures for managing priorities of time and space so that no one medium, or group of cognate media, is able to command a monopoly of knowledge and thereby restrict a society’s worldview. This is why, in principle, I want to embrace e-books: because of the many ways they seem to hold in check the worst excesses of printed books, as well as provide a viable alternative for people who might otherwise retreat from the world of letters.

At last we’ve come full circle—specifically, to the epigraph from Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos with which I opened this preface. Bezos sees a bright future for e-books, and if he has anything to say about the matter—and make no mistake about it, he does—the remaining shelf life for printed books could be awfully truncated indeed. He’s not alone in his evangelism for e-books. No less than Oprah Winfrey has joined him at the pulpit, singing the praises of her favorite new gadget—the Amazon Kindle—in a 2008 episode of her TV talk show, which just as easily could have passed for an infomercial.²³

It’s not just the captains of industry who lately are bearing witness to e-books. So, too, is James Tracy, headmaster of a Massachusetts prep school called Cushing Academy. A little less than a year after Winfrey professed her love for the Kindle, Tracy decided it would be a good idea to gut his school library. Of the 20,000 or so p-books comprising the collection, a meager five percent—about 1,000 volumes in all—now remain. As he explained in the Boston Globe, When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books. Tracy added, "This isn’t Fahrenheit 451. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology."²⁴ Instead of loaning out printed materials, Cushing’s librarians are now in the business of distributing Sony Readers and Amazon Kindles. The physical space of the library has been similarly transformed, the stacks having been replaced by a digital data center replete with Ethernet jacks and three large-screen video displays.

In a recent book about the future of publishing, Jeff Gomez claims that while print is not yet dead, it is undoubtedly sickening.²⁵ He parts company with Bezos in that he doesn’t believe p-books, as a particular species of media, are doomed to extinction. Books themselves will never entirely go away. Like Headmaster Tracy, however, Gomez imagines a future in which printed books are reduced to a technological minority, and their presence, to little more than tokenism.²⁶

Individually and collectively, these visions for the future disturb me. They also account for why, at points throughout this preface, I’ve qualified my support for e-books. E-books haven’t yet managed to secure a monopoly of knowledge at all comparable to the one printed books once enjoyed. The former are an emergent, not a dominant, technology. Yet it seems clear that people of power and influence are attempting to position e-books as the principal means for delivering words and symbols to folks everywhere. Most of those people, regrettably, haven’t thought through the consequences of their actions. They see e-books primarily as conveniences, revenue sources, or positional goods, and less as complements or correctives to the biases of printed books. What the e-book fundamentalists downplay, in other words, are the dangers that inhere in tilting book culture, and perhaps societies more broadly, toward the prerogatives of space-binding technologies.

Already the excesses are becoming apparent. In July 2009 Amazon.com learned that one of the e-book companies with which it had contracted, MobileReference, had neglected to acquire U.S. publishing rights for a small number of titles appearing under its imprimatur. In the print-on-paper world, the response probably would have gone something like this: assuming it didn’t want to pay the licensing fee, MobileReference would have pulped any illegal books remaining in its inventory; Amazon.com would have promptly discontinued selling the books; and owing to its meticulous record-keeping, the retailer might have contacted the customers who’d purchased the titles, informing them of the error and requesting a return. Physically chasing down each and every copy would have been out of the question, since doing so would have been cost-prohibitive and quite possibly overstepped the bounds of propriety.

But this wasn’t the print-on-paper world. Amazon.com responded not by issuing polite requests but instead by remotely deleting the offending volumes from the Kindles of anyone who’d purchased them, executing the recall by means of the 3G wireless network. At least Amazon.com had the good sense to issue refunds, but that hardly lessened the sting some Kindle devotees must have felt upon realizing the company’s promise of books in 60 seconds just as easily could mean gone in 60 seconds. It didn’t help matters that the main e-book in question was George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, in which reading materials are subject to deletion at the whim of a distant yet ever-present totalitarian government.

Apple may have entered the e-book—or is it now iBook?—market only recently, but its policies have managed to raise some eyebrows, too. To the best of my knowledge, the company hasn’t deleted any titles from its customers’ iPhones and iPads without asking permission. (Like Amazon.com, it does possess the technological capability to do so.) Still, you’d be hard-pressed to describe Apple as restrained when it comes to selling e-books. The company has opted to take a more preemptive approach to content management, stringently vetting any material that may eventually sell in its App or iBooks store.

In one case Apple passed on the NewsToons e-book application, featuring satirical work by political cartoonist Mark Fiore. In another, it rejected a comic book–styled version of James Joyce’s Ulysses, called Ulysses Seen, which depicts a bare-chested woman in one panel. In still another instance, it said no to a graphic novel app / adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest because of several illustrations showing gay men with exposed backsides kissing and caressing.²⁷ These works, Apple insisted, violated section 3.3.14 of its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which gives the company broad rights to determine what’s suitable for its customers: Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.²⁸ Apple later reconsidered its decision to bar these e-book applications, a result of bad press and, in Fiore’s case, his having been honored with a Pulitzer Prize for excellence in political cartooning.²⁹ But these incidents also underscore the degree to which iBooks is hardly your typical bookstore. While it’s the prerogative of booksellers to refuse to stock particular titles, seldom do they so directly determine content in the manner that Apple—acting as both publisher and merchant—has. This power is all the more worrisome in cases where Apple is the exclusive seller of a given edition. What we have is a computer company evolving into an influential and indeed fickle cultural gatekeeper, one that’s agnostic about preserving U.S. publishing’s longstanding commitment to free expression.

Should the e-book fundamentalists prevail in their endeavors, I would expect to see many more episodes like these in the years to come. They’re the product of a tension Innis identifies in societies where space-binding technologies predominate. On the one hand, e-readers and other mobile technologies encourage decentralization. They do so not only by promoting itinerancy but also, and more significantly, by helping to loosen many of the physical ties and social obligations that yoke people to traditional institutions such as the home, school, store, library, and workplace. Yet as Innis affirms, and as the preceding examples from Amazon.com and Apple suggest, an opposing tendency—toward centralization—would seem to attenuate at least some of the liberties that arise in relationship to mobility-enhancing technologies. Innis prefers the term administration where I prefer control, but either way the outcome is the same: a concentrated group of powerful authorities is slowly emerging, who have made it their job to govern (I use the term loosely) a population unfixed from its conventional moorings.³⁰ Hence the term space-binding, which refers to the strong centripetal pull entities like Amazon.com, Apple, and, I should add, Google exert on a society that would otherwise be stretching outward centrifugally.

More than fifty years ago Raymond Williams declared, We live in an expanding culture.³¹ The optimism of this statement is striking today, and it was perhaps even more so at the time he composed it. Williams meant it as a rejoinder to his colleagues in Britain’s English departments and indeed to the country’s upper-crust, so many of whom inveighed against the new consumer goods and cultural styles that flourished throughout the United Kingdom after the Second World War. They feared the new edging out the old, the mass-produced forcing out the time-honored and worthy. But Williams saw things differently. In true democratic spirit, he proposed that culture needn’t be a zero-sum game, and that consequently there was room enough for everyone and everything.

This is exactly the lesson we need to hold on to with respect to book culture in the late age of print. The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to ensure that we continue living in an expanding culture, which is to say, one that strikes a suitable balance between time- and space-binding technologies. This would be a culture in which neither printed nor electronic books exclusively ruled the day. Instead, it would be one in which the p and the e mingled promiscuously.

Ted Striphas

Bloomington, Indiana

May–June 2010

Notes

1. Jeff Howe, What If Everyone on Twitter Read One Book? Wired, March 24, 2010, http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/03/one-book-one-twitter/. See also Alison Flood, One Book, One Twitter Launches Worldwide Book Club with Neil Gaiman, Guardian, May 4, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/04/one-book-one-twitter-book-club.

2. James Carey, The Paradox of the Book, Library Trends 33, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 110; see also Jeff Gomez, Print Is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age (London: Macmillan, 2008), 131. According to Gomez, book culture is—by its very nature—retro.

3. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); Harold A. Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1940).

4. Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 7.

5. Harold A. Innis, Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1951), 64.

6. Innis, Empire and Communications, 8.

7. Innis, Empire and Communications, 165, 170; Innis, Bias of Communication, 82.

8. Carey, Paradox of the Book, 109. See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984),