As far back as 2400 BC, clay tablets about the size of shredded wheat biscuits were inscribed with cuneiform characters recording legal decisions or financial accounts. Paper from papyrus was used as a writing material in Egypt as early as 4000 BC. Due to the difficulty in finding papyrus, the king of Pergamon sought improvements in the preparation of animal skins, which led to the development of parchment. Though Gutenberg's printing press spread rapidly through Europe in the last half of the 15th century, the world would wait three centuries for books to become a major mass medium. Europeans coming to America seldom brought books with them. Typically, American settlers were often the uneducated masses rather than the European aristocracy. Three additional reasons kept them from bringing books:
Cambridge Press came to America in 1638, printing religious and government tracts. Ben Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanack" (p. 60) sold 10,000 copies annually beginning in 1732, and Franklin published the first American novel, Samuel Richardson's "Pamela" Books seldom printed because of need for permission from colonial governors. Printers went into open revolt after the passage of the Stamp Act. By November 1765, authorities refused to enforce the act Anti-British sentiment reached climax in mid-1770s with production of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," which sold 120,000 copies in three months. Books finally became a hit after compulsory education followed the Civil War. In 1861, the United States had the highest literacy rate in the world (58 percent) and by the beginning of the 20th century, 90 percent of Americans could read. Improvements in Printing In 1846, an American invented a rotary press where type was put on a cylinder. By 1865, another American put paper rolls together for high-speed printing. Ottmar Mergenthaler of Baltimore introduced linotype to the United States in 1884, which enabled printers to set type mechanically rather than manually. About the same time, the development of offset lithography made it possible to print from photographic plates rather than metal casts. Book publishers Harper Brothers and John Wiley and Sons began in early 1800s. Books including "The Scarlet Letter", "Moby Dick" and "Huckleberry Finn" appeared by mid-century, and were considered to be equal to or better than the works of famous European authors. Dime novels a.k.a. Pulp Novels came about in the 1860s which concentrated on frontier and adventure stories. The paperback didn't actually appear until Allen Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935. Sold for as little as 25 cents, the paperback allowed publishers to take chances on African American writers such as Richard Wright ("Native Son") as well as controversial works such as "Catcher in the Rye." Today, many books start as paperbacks. BOOKS as a Mass Medium Books are the least of the mass media as publishers produce narrowly or broadly aimed titles for readers who carry away individual units, allowing more voices to enter and survive the industry. Cultural value "Fahrenheit 451" describes firemen burning books because books serve as a powerful cultural force: (read quote pp. 62-63)
Remember: some people like to ban what they don't appreciate. Check out the list of censored books on p. 68. Recognize any titles? Among the most censored modern titles:
While concerned about banned books, groups like the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and the Campaign for Reader Privacy are more concerned about the effects of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. Even though pressure from librarians and others forced Congress to add safeguards for bookstore and library records, the government can still search the records of anyone it considers "relevant" to a terrorism investigation, including people who are not suspected of criminal conduct. Even more frightening, some people save the censors from having to work by practicing aliteracy, i.e. people possess the ability to read but choose not to. Mark Twain eloquently described the problem more than a century ago: "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." A 2007 National Endowment for the Arts study, To Read or Not to Read, suggested we read less and our reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, especially among young adults. Almost half of Americans between 18 and 24 never read for pleasure; 40 percent of first-year college students (and 35 percent of seniors) read nothing at all for pleasure. What are the consequences? "Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life," the report found.
Have you ever heard that the best movies were once books? Hollywood started the move toward convergence by taking great pieces of literature and turning them into something fit for the big screen. Seldom does a movie improve on the book; although in the case of "The Green Mile," you can make the case that the tighter time limit of the movie increases the impact of King's book. In the case of Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code," Ron Howard turned the controversy of the best-selling fictional account of truths hidden for centuries by the Catholic church into a blockbuster movie. The use of historical fact woven into the fabric of this fictional piece riled more than a few, specifically in relation to the Priory of Scion, a European secret society founded in 1099; the deeply devout Catholic sect known as Opus Dei; and the proclamation that Mary Magdalene sat at the right hand of Jesus in "The Last Supper," which some took as questioning both Christ's divinity, celibacy and possible genetic heritage. Of course, it's not the first time books about religion have irritated people. In 1989, Salman Rushdie published his fourth book, "The Satanic Verses," which has not been turned into a movie. However, the book caused the spiritual leader of Iran to order all Muslims to kill Rushdie for blasphemy; this fatwa remains in effect. This precipitated an international uproar: should people be punished for what they say or write? Or should anyone be free to insult and malign Muslims by disparaging Muhammad's honor? Now convergence is taking the book online. Publishing books initially or exclusively online offers a new way for ideas to be published. It can take the form of e-books and print on demand books. E-books are downloaded in electronic form from the Internet to a Palm Pilot. Stephen King sold 400,000 digital copies of his novella "Riding the Bullet" in 24 hours for $2.50 a piece on Amazon.com in 2000. But e-publishing will most likely help smaller, first-time authors who can bypass traditional publishers with niche books. Sites like E-Reads bring back out-of-print books in electronic and print formats. Authors distributing work through e-publishers can make royalties of 40-70 percent compared to 5-10 percent offered by traditional publishers. Writers who self-publish on the Web keep 100 percent of their income. Most d-books are downloaded for as little as $3, and the bookstore never closes. Problem: Will readers read books off computer screens? With the growing popularity of Kindle and the Sony Reader, groups like DiskUs Publishing are offering more e-books. Print on Demand (POD) books allow publishers to store works digitally, then print, bound and send them once a purchase made. They require no warehouse for storage, feature tiny production costs and produce a profit. They can make money in as few as 100 orders. They can also rush hot titles to the public before they're released in paper versions. Have you ever wanted to write a book? Now you can bypass the big publishers and go straight to the market with POD sites like AuthorHouse and Lulu. My dad started his own book line of children's books through a POD company and also wrote a book about my grandfather's service in World War II. Several Web sites now offer e-books specifically for PDAs, cell phones and e-readers, i.e. digital books that weigh less than 2 lbs and are the size of standard paperback, which allow readers to underline text, but have ability to download thousands of pages of text. The Sony Reader, dubbed the iBook, has proven successful enough that you can find texts through e-Books, fictionwise and memoware. Nonprofit organizations are also making searchable and downloadable books available online. Project Gutenberg will offer 1 million noncopyrighted classics; the Million Book Project set its goal for 1 million government and older titles; the Open Content Alliance seeks to digitize the holdings of many of its member libraries; and the International Children's Digital Library and the Rosetta Project hope to make tens of thousands of current and antique children's books from around the world available for download. Conglomeration and Hypercommercialism Although more than 81,000 businesses call themselves book publishers, only a small percentage produce four or more titles per year. A few giants dominate the industry:
Each of the giants once functioned as an independent publisher, but are now large national or international corporate conglomerates that control 80 percent of U.S. book sales and even have a piece of the e-publishing business and the POD business, e.g. Random House owns Xlibris and Barnes & Noble owns iUniverse. On the positive side, conglomeration promises capital and promotion. On the negative side, conglomeration and hypercommercialism contribute to worries about product quality and the emphasis on the bottom line. Little pride taken in the books and risk-taking is perishing. While looking for the block-buster, there's little consideration for literary merit or for the unknown writer. This leads to the fear that only the most promotable books will be published, i.e. celebrity-based tell-all autobiographies and the like. Publishers back well-known writers and offset their investment with subsidiary rights (rights to sale book, contents and characters to filmmakers, paperback publishers, book clubs, product producers) The importance of promotion and publicity leads to an increase in instant books, flooding the market with famed authors (see WOT), publishers paying online booksellers to promote their books, and paid product placement. The "Hollywoodization" of books has major companies like Viacom, Time Warner and NewsCorp heavily investing into publishing houses in hopes of finding texts that can be converted into movies. Another disturbing trend is the paid product placement within books since 2000 (see p. 77). The overcommercialization of the industry has been somewhat mitigated by the rise of smaller presses. Alternative presses specialize in specific areas such as the environment, feminism, gay issues and how to. At the turn of the century, only 20,000 publishers existed; today, there's more than 81,000. They also publish writing uninteresting to bigger publishing houses, e.g. literary commentary and poetry books like Red Hawk's "Self-Observation" and "Wreckage with a Beating Heart." Book stores dwindle as chains move in, e.g. Barnes and Noble, Books-A-Million, Borders - usually in malls, operating on the Wal-Mart principle. But online stores like Amazon and books.com take advantage of readers buying books online - the two account for 90 percent of the online market.
In 1999, only 45 percent of Americans said they read for more than 30 minutes. After Harry Potter came out, 84 percent of Americans said they were reading. Though it's not all attributable to the Potter books, they helped create a new generation of readers. The excitement surrounding the release of the last Harry Potter book in 2007 offers several important media literacy lessons. Why did the books resonate with the younger audiences? The controversy around efforts to have the series banned (some call the series antireligious and anti-Christian) call into play the particular media literacy skill of developing the ability and willingness to effectively and meaningfully understand content. The series attracts older as well as younger readers. The initial printing of a Harry Potter book is about 14 million copies. Twenty-three weeks prior to the release of the final book in the series, Deathly Hallows reached No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list. The seven books in the series have sold more than 400 million copes worldwide, have been published in over 66 languages in more than 200 countries, and occupy the top four spots on the all-time fastest-selling booklist. Another element of media literacy is the development of an awareness of the impact of media. The Harry Potter series demonstrates that influence. Rather than dumb down for its audience, the series got better in response to reader enthusiasm. Rather than becoming more homogenized like radio, books are offering better fare. In short, Harry Potter shows that an audience that develops heightened expectations can and will have those expectations met. Now with the advent of Shelfari and the Live Literature Network, you can not only beat aliteracy but also recommend great books for other people to read! Images and articles used here under Educational Fair Use. Notes originally produced to accompany Stanley Baran's "Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture." 6th ed. If you don't understand something in this Web note, please e-mail Dr. Sitton.
©Ronald W. Sitton 2009 Revised 111809 — http://www.uamont.edu/FacultyWeb/sitton/crz/mcom/books.html |
