{"id":13607,"date":"2015-03-13T02:31:06","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T02:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/literatures-business-model-explained-with\/"},"modified":"2015-03-13T02:31:06","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T02:31:06","slug":"literatures-business-model-explained-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/literatures-business-model-explained-with\/","title":{"rendered":"Literature’s business model explained, with special reference to the age of the\u00a0Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n\tWhat is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not
\ndragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books
\nnot only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually
\nbegan it. They are part of the fuel that drives it. The growth of the
\nchain model in books offered everyone the opportunity to decry the
\ngroceryfication of the bookstore, utterly belying the reality, as
\nStriphas outlines in his excellent The Late Age of Print, that the
\nbookstore is in fact the model for the supermarket:\n<\/p>\n

\n In the history of shop design, it is bookstores, strangely
\nenough, that were the precursors of supermarkets. They, alone of all
\ntypes of shop, made use of shelves that were not behind counters, with
\nthe goods arranged for casual browsing, and for what was not yet called
\nself-service. Also, when brand name goods and their accompanying
\npackages were non-existent or rare in the sale of food, books had covers
\n that were designed at once to protect the contents and to entice the
\npurchaser; they were proprietary products with identifiable authors and
\nnew titles.<\/i>\n<\/p>\n

\nThere are other examples of significant innovation being driven by the
\npublishers\u2014Penguin founder Allen Lane\u2019s 1937 paperback vending machine
\nfor better commuter distribution being among the most charming\u2014but the
\npoint is that books aren\u2019t sitting grumpily in economy class on the
\nairplane to the future. They\u2019re in the cockpit.<\/p>\n

The PostScript output of PageMaker (later to become the more familiar
\n\u201cPDF\u201d) undermined the Industrial Revolution model, initiating the
\ndigital, post-Industrial phase of abundance, even though, at the time,
\nit appeared to be reinforcing the Industrial model by reforming it.
\nIndependent presses could make digital files and send them to offset
\nprinters. They still had to deal with the classic economies of scale of
\nanalog printing, but they didn\u2019t have to deal with the complex,
\ninaccessible, and arcane world of traditional typesetting. The number of
\n publishers began to increase, as did the number of titles, as the
\ncreation of a title (by publisher, of course, not by author) became
\nsignificantly cheaper and began to undo ever so slightly Vonnegut\u2019s
\notherwise accurate analysis of the business of culture. The genius opera
\n singer needed systems to distribute her genius as broadly as possible,
\nand the copyright system combined with analog reproduction made that
\neasy. And it was getting easier for the non-mainstream, too, be that the
\n lover of the avant-garde, or the early music, or the campy, or the
\nlocal, or the familial (the recording of your grandmother singing
\nopera). The non-mainstream was abetted by the growth of the superstore
\nmodel of bookstores. The traditional independent bookstore stocked
\n5,000\u201310,000 titles, and so could only handle the new and backlist
\noutput of a limited number of publishers. But a Barnes & Noble or
\nBorders superstore could have fifty, sixty, or seventy thousand titles!
\nIndeed, it needed those non-mainstream offerings to fill its shelves.
\nIronically, while indie, alternative, and literary presses frequently
\ndecried the predations of the superstores, the superstores were critical
\n to their existence.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest\u2026<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

mostlysignssomeportents: What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it. They are part of the fuel that drives it. The growth of the chain model in books offered everyone […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-3xt","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13607\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}