Because of the influx of advertising on the free version of Wikidot, the Differences & Repetitions Wiki has MOVED. Please visit the new site: http://www.diffandrep.org/wiki.
Kindle: The New Book Mobile or,
The Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling
Ted Striphas
American Studies Association Annual Convention
Albuquerque, NM, October 16, 2008
(1) This presentation is an extension of my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control, which will be published early next year by Columbia University Press.
(a) It dovetails with themes I explore in Chapter 1 (on electronic books and intellectual property law) and Chapter 3 (on book distribution, labor, and Amazon.com).
(2) Today I’ll be talking about Amazon’s portable electronic reading device, Kindle, which went on sale beginning November 19, 2007 and immediately caused a stir.
(a) Kindle’s purpose, explained Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a Newsweek cover story, would be to bring books—what he called “the last bastion of analog”—into the digital realm.1
(b) Later that week on The Charlie Rose Show, which devoted a full, hour-long program to Kindle, Bezos retrenched somewhat.
(i) There, he indicated that his company’s new e-reader wasn’t intended to “outbook the [printed] book.”
(ii) “Instead of trying to duplicate every last feature,” Bezos clarified, “we have to look for things that we can do with this technology that we could never do with a paper book.”2
(c) Here, Bezos put his finger on what you might call “the paradox of the ebook.”3
(i) By this I mean that Kindle and other e-reading devices are at once less and more capable of duplicating the form and function—call it the experience—of printed books.
(ii) And as I’ll demonstrate in a moment, a great deal of public conversation about Kindle, and about the moral and intellectual worth of ebooks in general, operates within the rather narrow discursive horizons set forth by this paradox.
(3) In this paper, therefore, I want to argue that a fixation on Kindle’s paradoxically imitative qualities deflects attention from the ways in which Amazon aspires to transform the act of reading itself into an economically lucrative, value-generating activity.
The Paradox of the Ebook
(4) Kindle presents itself as clearly and undeniably book-like—by which I mean, printed book-like.
(a) Its box resembles a codex volume whose form suggests that it might be stored on a bookshelf alongside a dictionary, encyclopedia, or other substantial reference matter.
(b) Its carrying case could easily pass for a fine, leather-bound journal, or perhaps a daybook, not unlike those you might find in a book or stationery store.
(i) These are what the literary theorist Gerard Genette would call the “paratextual”—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say “paratechnological”—elements whose purpose is to frame the perception and use of a given text or, in the case of Kindle, a given textual platform.
(ii) They are, in Genette’s words, “thresholds of interpretation” through which one must pass en route to using Kindle.4
(c) Beyond them, Kindle itself has been widely praised for mimicking the “immersive” experience said to characterize printed book reading, thanks to its use of high-tech electronic ink developed at MIT’s famed media lab.
(i) “The key feature of a [printed] book is that it disappears,” Bezos has claimed…
(ii) …and it is precisely this level of transparency that his Kindle is supposed to live up to.5
(5) You probably can see where this is headed—straight into the paradox of the ebook.
(a) This is especially so when you factor in all of Kindle’s ostensible improvements over printed books, which are often and widely touted.
(b) These include an online dictionary, the ability to change font sizes at the push of a button, wireless connectivity and content delivery, and more.
(c) I won’t adjudicate or attempt to reconcile this paradox.
(i) If anything, I believe that paradoxes result from poorly posed problems.
(ii) And because I sort through this issue at length in my book and elsewhere, in the interest of time I won’t delve into too much detail here….
(iii) …except to note that, since at least the time of Plato, virtually every communication technology has been accused of diminishing the presence and authority of the word, from the human voice to the human hand, from the typewriter to the word processor and beyond.
(iv) So either we resign ourselves to living in a world in which technology leads to incrementally diminished capacities and to a spiraling loss of authenticity…
(v) …or we try to reframe the problem space so that we might ask different sorts of questions about communication technologies—beyond, say, Kindle’s ability (or not) to “outbook the book.”
Labor
(6) Dallas W. Smythe’s path-breaking essay, “Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism,” published in 1977, is particularly helpful in this regard.
(a) There, Smythe set out to answer the seemingly straight-forward question, What do television and other advertising-supported media make?
(b) Or, as Smythe more eloquently put it, “What is the commodity form of mass-produced, advertising-supported communications?”6
(c) The most immediately apparent answer is programming content, of course, or the “stuff” that we see on TV.
(i) Yet, Smythe rejected that commonsense view in no uncertain terms.
(ii) “The bourgeois idealist view of the reality of the communication commodity is ‘messages,’ ‘information,’ ‘images,’ ‘meaning,’ ‘entertainment,’ ‘orientation,’ ‘education,’ and ‘manipulation.’ All of these concepts are subjective mental entities and all deal with superficial appearances.”7
(d) Thus media content and its more manifest ideological dimensions were, to use the Marxist terminology, merely the “form of appearance” of something even more fundamental—the labor audiences perhaps unwittingly engage in each time we turn on our TV sets.
(i) Consequently, Smythe referred in his work not to audiences but instead either to the “audience product” or the “audience commodity.”
(ii) He did so in an effort to underscore how television networks packaged and sold viewers to advertisers, with the promise that some, and hopefully many, would go on to consume the products the latter were charged with promoting.8
(iii) For Smythe, then, TV watching was an instrument for commodifying (or in today’s industry parlance, “monetizing”) human labor power, albeit one that put a significant twist on an old Marxian theme.
(iv) Rather than selling one’s labor power on the open market for oneself and being remunerated accordingly, TV executives and producers essentially alienated viewers’ labor power from them and reaped all of the financial rewards.
(e) Now this is, admittedly, fairly old news as far as television and perhaps journalism studies are concerned.
(i) That said, it’s an issue to which book historians have largely, and perhaps understandably, been oblivious.
(ii) In what remains of this paper, then, I want to stage the “problem” of Kindle by following a blueprint similar to the one drawn up by Smythe.
The Work of Reading
(7) Kindle has been generically described as a “mobile technology.”
(a) It certainly is a capacious device, able to store the equivalent of about 200 printed books in the factory-installed memory alone.
(b) Beyond offering users the allure of a carrying a well-stocked but still light weight library wherever they go, Kindle can be considered a mobile technology for another reason as well.
(i) Onboard mobile phone technology makes Kindle probably the first stand-alone e-reading device to provide for instantaneous, two-way communications between bookseller (in this case Amazon.com) and consumer.
(ii) It’s not merely a mobile technology, in other words, as much as it is a digital version of the book mobile in which you pay for, rather than borrow, whatever you may care to acquire.
(iii) It’s little wonder, then, that Bezos describes Kindle not as a device but as a “service” and as “an extension of the Amazon store.”9
(iv) Kindle promises to usher in nothing less than an era of convenient, ubiquitous bookselling.
(c) Much has been made about Kindle’s downstream capabilities—the fact that you can acquire the complete contents of any Kindle-formatted book in under a minute, provided you’re within range of a cell tower.
(d) But what about the data it transmits upstream, back to Amazon.com?
(i) The Kindle license agreement and terms of use are instructive in this regard.
(ii) In the subsection entitled “Information Received,” the agreement states:
(iii) “The Device Software will provide Amazon with data about your Device and its interaction with the Service (such as available memory, up-time, log files and signal strength) and information related to content on your Device and your use of it (such as automatic bookmarking of the last page read and content deletions from the Device).”
(iv) Here’s the especially intriguing part: “Annotations, bookmarks, notes, highlights, or similar markings you make on your Device are backed up through the service and subject to the Amazon.com privacy notice.”10
(v) And there, it’s worth mentioning, all of the data you generate while reading on your Kindle falls within the purview of “the information we [Amazon.com] collect and analyze” for marketing and related purposes.11
(8) I’ll return to this point shortly, but first let me say a few words about the recent changes Amazon has made to its corporate identity and core mission.
(a) Most of us sitting in this room, I would venture to say, consider Amazon.com to be an online retailer.
(i) That’s a fair enough assumption, but it’s only partially accurate.
(ii) Since 2002, the company has actively—and until the last year or two, quietly—been making itself over into a “web services” provider, or even more ambitiously, into a “platform” upon which to construct on- and offline businesses.
(b) Kindle’s data collection efforts thus belong to a much broader corporate strategy in which, as Forbes Magazine has put it, Amazon’s “behind-the-scenes data center services” are emerging center stage.12
(i) These include Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, which provides paid-for, on-demand computing capabilities to third-party businesses…
(ii) …and Amazon Simple Storage Service, or S3, in which businesses pay Amazon to store their data on the company’s voluminous servers.
(c) Amazon’s goal with these and other efforts is to monetize any and all of the company’s excess capacity, and to transform idle assets into value-producing ones.
(i) The point of all this is that Amazon isn’t just the retailer most of us think we know.
(ii) It is also and significantly becoming what Business Week has called “a kind of 21st century digital utility” not unlike Siva Vaidhyanathan’s old nemesis, Google.13
(d) Now, Amazon of course has been collecting, analyzing, and exploiting customer information since the company’s inception back in 1994.
(i) But in conjunction with its recent emphasis on data services, it seems to me that Kindle promises to intensify this process in at least three ways:
• first, by broadening the scope of data collection to encompass not only the retail sphere, which as long been mined for what Oscar Gandy calls “actionable customer intelligence," but also now the fine grain of everyday life itself;14
• second, and more specifically, by transforming people’s idiosyncratic and heretofore mysterious reading itineraries into data-generating activities;
• and finally, then, by implicating those acts in a larger system of productive relations whereby they become a form of instrumental, value-producing labor.
(e) In this regard you might think of the Kindle I have with me today not only as a mobile e-reading device but also as a terminal node in a massively distributed, on-the-go focus group in which the participant pays and Amazon reaps most of the financial reward.15
Conclusion/Implications
(9) The question of whether Kindle can or cannot “outbook the [printed] book” clearly is a smokescreen, one whose terms invite debate around an intractable issue.
(a) Like the magician’s art of misdirection, it draws attention to the artifact itself while deflecting it from the broader productive relations of which the device and its content may be considered the “form of appearance.”
(b) What’s at stake, then, is how Amazon is actively producing laboring subjects in and around an everyday practice, book reading, which to my knowledge has never shared as direct a relationship to economically productive activity as it does with Kindle.
(c) What’s also at stake is Amazon’s larger desire to re-invent itself as a company where the buying and selling of retail goods becomes not an end in itself but instead the “hook” by which to obtain potentially even more valuable client data.
(10) Beyond all this, Kindle also raises the question of what exactly we mean when we invoke the phrase, “mobile technology.”
(a) The device certainly delivers on its promise as a portable library, but is that the only way in which to gauge mobility?
(b) Indeed, isn’t it significant that Kindle content is effectively immobilized by on-board digital rights management technology, which prohibits you from sharing your e-reading materials with other Kindle users?
(c) Finally, what about all of that information that flows upstream from your Kindle to Amazon.com, where it then becomes proprietary?
(i) If indeed Amazon aspires to transform itself into a kind of “utility,” one built significantly on the back of information provided to it by the public, shouldn’t it then begin taking on some of the public responsibilities of one?
(ii) For starters this would demand much greater transparency on Amazon’s part, a process that could begin by opening up its proprietary databases to those would use the information to contribute to public knowledge.
(iii) Imagine what public librarians might discover about people’s book reading habits, for example, were they given access to such unprecedented information.
(11) The point is, if you’re de facto going to put the reading public to work, then there ought to be a public benefit beyond a more personalized marketing campaign.
Interesting paper. What do you think Amazon's motivations were for expanding its business plan from retail to web services?
To be something of a vulgar Marxist about it, my understanding is that Amazon is doing its best to become the "owner of the instruments of production" (distribution, exchange, etc.). Its web and order fulfillment services are especially instructive in this regard. Essentially the company is trying to position itself as an incubator for small businesses. The plan is relatively simple in the abstract: Amazon shoulders most of the heavy fixed capital costs; start-ups (and even more established businesses) then rent whatever fixed capital they may need from Amazon on an ad hoc (i.e., "on-demand") basis—from server to warehouse space and more.
What's especially interesting to observe here is how Amazon is in the midst of transforming itself from a business into a business "platform," upon which others may now opt to run. I'm not entirely sure of what the implications are of this move, but Amazon may well be reshuffling the deck in terms of our understandings of the relationship between class, power, and ownership.
I'm really loving the idea that a technology can function as a kind of rhetorical alchemy, transforming a mundane and nebulous activity—what is "reading," anyway?—into a quasi-object. This presupposes the self-evident but highly improbable existence of a whole range of objectifications, including especially the notions of "data" and, of course, "intellectual property."
But it may be worth retaining, for critical purposes, some notion of paradox within the newly posed problem; after all, reading becomes labor only when this alchemy is performed. One might argue that what Amazon is selling is just as much the rhetorical technology that objectifies and commodifies "reading" as the activity or products of reading itself. A useful response to such a claim might be to stress the sociality of another, anterior mode of production: the discursive production of *transparent* objectification.
Your astute observations remind me that underneath every form of commodification—of labor, of consumption, of risk, etc.—is a kind of discursive profligacy that makes objectification possible, turning, to read Marx via Bataille, fluid and thus irrepressibly munificent signifying capacities into an infinite variety of relatively stable tokens. This would suggest that, beyond the problem of expropriation for private gain, there is a problem of constraining this discursive largesse, restricting its scope by, in effect, turning it against itself. Is it a coincidence that at stake in the emerging forms of commodification are processes of signification itself?
Thank you for such a thoughtful and substantive comment. You've given me a great deal to think about, especially given my focus. You rightly (and quite kindly) point out that my attention to the artifact, Kindle, and to the larger political-economic relations within which it is embedded, happens at the expense of the discursive relations that enable the forms/practices of commodification I've set out to describe. And in that respect you're exactly right: "what Amazon is selling is just as much the rhetorical technology that objectifies and commodifies 'reading' as the activity or products of reading itself."
For me, what's intriguing to note here is how this "selling" seems to occur obliquely. The company never comes out and says, "we're turning reading into an economically lucrative, value generating activity." It just kind of happens, no doubt the result of extensive internal documents and memos, combined with the technology, Kindle, which you might think of as a material bearer of these and other discursive practices. I suppose I'm trying to open up three questions here: (1) is it worth thinking about discourse and technology in cause-effect terms, and if so, which is which? (2) to what extent do we (researchers) have access to the discursive conditions you're speaking of (other than via proxy)? and (3) how would one intervene so as to constrain what you aptly call "discursive largesse?"
Again, a really provocative comment—one that will lead, no doubt, to a broader reconceptualization of the paper in subsequent drafts.
I guess I should clarify that I understood you to be posing question (1), and that is what got me thinking along these lines. For me, one of the more intriguing implications of your approach is that it productively undermines any facile distinction between technology and discourse.
To the degree that the Kindle catalyzes the objectification of "reading," it *is* discourse. That's what I meant by referring to its effects as "alchemy." So when you say that the process is oblique, I understand this to be the rhetorical achievement of the technology itself. To the extent that it literally transforms an amorphous constellation of activities into a commodity, it performs the same "reifying" action as a name, a definition or a hegemonic signifier, at once dissimulating its own performative efficacy in doing so. This, in turn, is possible in part because it "reads" like, or comes pre-coded as, an object *rather* than a discourse.
At the same time, insofar as this sort of dissimulation is the condition of possibility for any meaning or objectivity whatsoever, it becomes important to note that, in addition to commodifying already preconstituted practices of reading, the Kindle may represent a step toward commodifying the discursive constitution of practices—or discursive tokens—as such (since reading is not just one practice among others but overtly involves the production of meaning).
This idea is so fascinating and provocative—technologies as the material reifications of specific social practices and discursive relations. I like how this formulation takes us back in a way to the Greek root of the word "technology," techne. The latter mediates the tension at the heart of our present-day term, "technique," which refers simultaneously to a set of material or embodied operations and to wisdom that must be passed on from person to person, discursively.
The even more abstract (in a good way) point you raise, "Kindle may represent a step toward commodifying the discursive constitution of practices," may share an affinity of sorts with the post appearing below, "What is the Commodity Here?" But in light of my response to that interlocutor, I'm beginning to wonder if indeed Amazon is "commodifying" reading (or discursive practices more generally) or if indeed the company is discovering ways to "monetize" them—two terms I admittedly conflate in the paper that may not refer to exactly the same processes after all.
Perhaps some correspondences are beginning to emerge here, something like:
I'm genuinely just spit-balling on here, but this seems to be one way in which the conversation is headed….
I love how you point out that what seems to be added functionality actually enhances Amazon's market data collection efforts as much, if not more than, it enhances the user experience.
I personally own a Sony Reader and find it a bit ironic that a company like Sony which is known for particularly harsh DRM and a self professed desire to invade every single aspect of the consumer's "digital life" has missed an opportunity like this.
Yes…Sony has been quite the leader (and a rather poor one at that) where it comes to DRM. I recall that some of their DRM-laden CDs caused huge security problems with the Windows operating system in the early part of this decade. In any case, the point you raise is important: DRM is just one step in what you might call a "broad-spectrum" approach to monitoring and controlling how people use and interact with the goods they've purchased. It may be strange to think of things this way, but in the era of Kindle, you now effectively pay not only for a printed book when you buy one but also for a certain modicum of privacy in your reading. I don't mean to be overly-pessimistic about this, given that Kindle sales, though brisk, are still by most assessments fairly small. Still, what troubles me are the larger trends such a device portends.
Thank you so much for your observations and comments!
Ted,
One thing that struck me about this section is that it seems to equate amazon's outbooking the book not only with an attempt to alienate the labor of reading and reap financial reward, but also with an attempt to out-theorize reception theory. In fact, the whole thing really substantiates something that I've long believed about these savvy new multimedia, multi-international businesses: that they're always a step ahead of the academic disciplines that try to analyze them for some productive social end. While media reception theory (as practiced by academics) in usually attempts to address certain imbalances of power (as here, between the producer and the consumer—although I know that this isn't really a work of reception studies itself), corporations like amazon seem to be using the same theories (although with much better tools at their disposal) in order to accentuate precisely those imbalances within processes of distribution. To my mind, this raises some thorny questions about what theories of epistemology, of knowing what it is consumers actually think and know, actually contribute: is there anything we can do that can't be improved upon for a specifically capitalist gain? The idealist in me wants to agree with your plea for more transparency in how this data is used, but the cynic in me questions whether such businesses have any incentive to do that all…
Dave M.
Hi Dave,
I'm so glad you brought up the issue of reception studies. The field seems to me to be begging for some really solid intellectual-historical work that would document the connections between its "discovery" of the active, empowered consumer in the 1970s and efforts among marketers to champion exactly that image of the consumer from the late 1960s on. The coincidence, it seems to me, is no coincidence at all.
With that said, I do believe the contemporary moment is a genuinely mixed one: there are more outlets for active, engaged, grassroots "participatory culture" (a la what we're doing here on D&RW) than ever before, and only some of those result in direct, value-generating activities such as those I describe in the paper. Of course, I say that not knowing exactly what if anything, Wikidot (the host for this site) does with the information we're posting on it. I suppose I should look into that……..
Thanks for the comment, Dave. Like those preceding it, it opens up some important directions I'll need to explore further. For now, embrace your inner idealist and demand transparency. Heaven knows, we're in a rare moment in which people are beginning once again to see the virtues in regulation.
This is really interesting stuff, and I wonder how many people who buy the Kindle have an expectation going into the purchase that such data-gathering will occur. I suspect it would be a fairly high number, considering how used to demographics we've become these days, particularly folks who have the money and technophilia (or research needs) to shell out for such an item.
What I'm more curious about is how exactly we can speak of commodification in this situation, a curiosity prompted by the discussion above around the production of the discursive objects necessary for commodification and the continued circulation of capital. Comparing the work of the Kindle to Smythe's "audience commodity" seems to muddy the waters around the commodity. In Smythe, the phrase "audience commodity" makes sense insofar as audience attention is the commodity. It is literally our act of attending to advertisements that is sold to advertisers (indeed, if the TV in on but I'm not paying attention to it, it would seem that, at least in that particular case, my own attention is not commodified by the network). But it doesn't quite make sense to call "reading" the Kindle's commodity (in the way that web advertising very directly commodifies web-surfing). It is an exploited labor, to be sure, but one that goes entirely unsold and unpaid—the commodity would seem to be the information generated about the reading selection and practice (assuming that Amazon is selling that demographic info in addition to using it themselves). In the case of television, attention is sold to companies that sell goods and services. In the case of Kindle, information about human activity is sold to marketers working on behalf of those selling goods and services. This discussion does, I admit, remain within a fairly classical Marxism, and would probably be a lot more useful in dialogue with work on immaterial and affective labor.
Reading thus becomes a value-productive activity, but not itself a commodity. The upshot of this, for me, is that Kindle owners could conceivably organize a sort of demographic noise-bomb by "reading" books interminably, taking nonsensical or deceptive notes on their Kindle "books," and otherwise scrambling the data gathered by the device. Detourning the device in a way that could perhaps detourn the discursive production of reading as object, returning reading to the realm of practice and invention (even if mischievous invention). Of course, this requires buying the device and some books in the first place, but it is something one can't really do with one's relation to TV commercials—there's no talk-back with commercials, no opportunity to lie about whether or how you're watching them.
The point you raise about Smythe, his conception of "the audience commodity," and the precise role Kindle readers play as laboring subjects is an astute and important one. Thank you for pointing out the error/oversight/elision to me. I'll be sure to make appropriate adjustments to the final version.
A couple of things here. First, in my background reading for this paper, I ran across Eileen Meehan's idea of "cybernetic commodities." It came up in a quite interesting discussion of commodification in Vincent Mosco's The Political Economy of Communication (p. 150). I wonder if this idea might mediate the tension that seems to be arising across several of the comments here, namely, between the labor of Kindle reading and the acts of discursive production that must take prior to and alongside that labor so as to render it value producing. I'm inclined to see an opening here—plus, "cybernetic commodity" would seem to account for the fact that the labor of Kindle readers isn't what's getting commodified per se as much as the data they're producing.
Second (and I'm not sure exactly what to make of this), it strikes me as odd that, with Kindle, "labor" and "commodity" seem to be severed so starkly from one another that even a classically Marxist framework cannot quite account for what's going on. There seems to me a double alienation taking place here whereby (a) audience labor is alienated from readers by Amazon and (b) those readers produce a kind of raw material (data, information) that the company may then choose to commodify or otherwise use. But what's interesting to me is how, in this scenario, human labor power is not a commodity to be bought and sold at all. Instead, it's more akin to fixed capital—a "human resource" in the baldest sense of the term.
All this suggests that I need to go much deeper in terms of exploring the relations between laboring subjects, capital (as in value producing assets), and cybernetic commodities.
You've really opened some doors here. THANKS!