Books and Social Media

How the Digital Age is Shaping the Printed Word

Miriam J. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000415568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Social media and digital technologies are transforming what and how we read. Books and Social Media considers the way in which readers and writers come together in digital communities to discover and create new works of fiction.

This new way of engaging with fiction stretches the boundaries of what has been considered a book in the past by moving beyond the physical or even digitally bound object to the consideration of content, containers, and the ability to share. Using empirical data and up-to-date research methods, Miriam Johnson introduces the ways in which digitally social platforms give rise to a new type of citizen author who chooses to sidestep the industry's gatekeepers and share their works directly with interested readers on social platforms. Gender and genre, especially, play a key role in developing the communities in which these authors write. The use of surveys, interviews, and data mining brings to the fore issues of gender, genre, community, and power, which highlight the push and pull between these writers and the industry.

Questioning what we always thought we knew about what makes a book and traditional publishing channels, this book will be of interest to anyone studying or researching publishing, book history, print cultures, and digital and contemporary literatures.

1

What is a book?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003186649-2

On first glance, ‘What is a book?’ is, perhaps, the most simple question with an obvious answer: a book is a bound object that has stories or images inside. That answer is correct. But it also falls dangerously short of truly tapping into what a book is and can be. In defining a book, we must first look at how the things around a book are changing, and how those changes seep into the outer edges of the traditional printed book and begin to alter it. These changes are often related to technological advances, but it is not enough to stop short and say, ‘eBooks and audiobooks are great advances and are still books.’ We have to take into account the changes that these technologies allow to happen. Specifically, digital technology and the widespread use of, and access to, the internet has given rise to social media, which in turn has changed how authors and readers relate to content and how they form communities around writing on social media platforms.

Historically, the book publishing industry has enjoyed long periods of stability followed by revolutionary upheavals that lead to radical changes in the way that books are written, published, and distributed. The most easily recognised shift was from the codex (AD 150) to the printing press (AD 1450), which gave rise to the traditionally bound books that we have today. Other technological advances such as magazine printing, mass-market paperbacks, eBooks, and audiobooks have also come of age in recent decades and have contributed to the evolving definition of a book by changing the format of a book in such a way that it retains tight connections, real or virtual, with the physical item itself.

From the time of inscribed clay tablets (2500 B.C.E.) until the digital revolution (1990s), a book had been a physical object that was usually portable, often collected, and prized as a “storehouse of human knowledge” (Kilgour, 1998, p. 3). The book itself has undergone physical changes over time, and book historians now use “the word ‘book’ in its widest sense, covering virtually any piece of written or printed text that has been multiplied, distributed, or in some way made public” (Eliot & Rose, 2007, p. 3). While this definition invites inclusivity for new forms of technologically produced writing, it is as vague as it is broad, and the question remains as to how this definition can evolve more specifically to encompass new and as of yet undiscovered forms of the book that develop around the traditional format.

Though the focus here is not book history, it is valuable to use book historians’ definitions to give a baseline for what the wider industry considers a book. That being said, we must keep in mind that every understanding of how a book is defined is grounded in what that particular person is able to say from their place of knowledge within the industry. Those with different experiences will have different considerations.

The publishing industry slowly but continually shifts and changes. As new technologies and media converge and grow both vertically and horizontally, the definition of a book must capture the essence of content while remaining fluid enough to encompass existing and future packaging of that content. In order to facilitate a suitably adaptable and forward-thinking definition of the book, it is necessary to first understand how the book is currently defined in the different areas of the industry and how those definitions have gained traction.

Digital publishing and the convergence of new technologies have altered the available formats of the book, with the development of eBooks and audiobooks, and different ways of getting content to readers, and we must, in turn, alter the discourse surrounding the book to reflect this change. In discussing ways that the themes of continuity around the definition of a book can be hindered by preconceptions, a good starting place is Foucault, who in his Archaeology of Knowledge states that to best prepare ourselves for understanding a discourse “we must rid ourselves of a whole mass of notions,” in this case, the set descriptors of a book. He goes on to explain that the specific notions “that must be suspended above all are those that emerge in the most immediate way: those of the book and the oeuvre” (1989, pp. 23–23).

Foucault alludes to the evolution of the book when he states that “The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it” (1989, p. 23). By stripping out the “interpretation of the facts” (p. 29) about what a book is, we can better define a book by looking at the “rule of simultaneous or successive emergence of the various objects that are named, described, analysed, appreciated, or judged in that relation” (p. 32). In other words, we must look at all the instances of a ‘book’ in order to understand what it can, and cannot, be. In the current age of technological advances, that includes texts written and shared within digitally social environments.

At the Shenzhen-UNESCO International Conference on “Digital Books and Future Technology,” Hitchens mentioned how “digital companies will most likely join the fold as publishing companies shift resources towards the burgeoning eBook industry” (2014, p. 13). However, he neglects to go further to examine how this shift will encompass media more broadly and only hints at the digitally social communities that can grow up around a published product, and he does not touch on the power dynamics such a shift contains. He does, however, suggest that “that the future of eBooks will be based on much more than text on a screen” (2014, p. 13). This can already be seen in the marketplace with publications such as Faber & Faber’s interactive book app of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2011) or read-aloud books for kids that add sound and effects to stories. Likewise, new forms of interactive literature such as UNRD provide a new format for experiencing real-time stories via a mobile device which showcases the convergence of ePublishing technologies and the way books, and the ways we interact with them, are changing.

The rise of new reading/writing-based technologies, algorithms, and formats does not herald the end of the printed book. In his talk for UNESCO, Hitchens concluded that “the demise of the physical book is still far from inevitable” (2014, p. 16). Thus far, the numbers agree, with recent Nielsen data showing that print book sales in 2019 rose 0.4% in the UK and 3.3% in Ireland, with 1.8 million ISBNs selling at least one physical copy in 2019 (Whelan, 2020).

Furthermore, Phillips, in his book Turning the Page: The Evolution of the Book, explores the current state of the book and its future potential. He discusses its forms, and he labels printed books “pbooks” as a way of acknowledging that although published products are often called books, “traditional routes of production are being left behind” (2014, p. xiii). The definition of a book is broadening to accommodate changes in technology and how we are all linked closely together via the internet in a global village. Along with this, we see movement in the power strategies, how digital communities grow, and the role of authorship in these new spaces.

Changes within the publishing industry regarding the definition of the book have not always been easily accepted. In 1998, Kilgour wrote that the eBook

has met with an unenthusiastic reception, chiefly because it presents a radical physical change for the user: from the familiar bound book in the hand to the monitor screen of a desktop computer or the flat-panel display of a laptop machine.

(p. 151)

By 2006, when Kelly wrote that “publishers have lost millions of dollars on the long-prophesied e-book revolution that never occurred” (p. 2), eBooks had become an accepted, if still unpopular, form of the book that echoed the physical book in the rear-view mirror but one that is held under glass.

Moving away from the traditional formats, if we took the content out of the container what is there to define a book? Let’s take, for example, a trade bestseller. The publishers distribute it in hardback, paperback, eBook formats, all of which are comfortably considered to be books. But what happens when the publisher converges media and creates an audiobook that resembles the bestseller only in that the content, not the format, is (mostly) the same?

Is an audiobook still a book? Michael Bhaskar suggests as an answer that an audiobook isn’t a real book, claiming that “Audiobooks are a halfway house – at one level they are sound, at another just another format of a text like a paperback or an eBook” (2013, p. 32). Is it, as Bhaskar argues, “sufficiently close to a book to easily absorb the associations of ‘book publishing’” (p. 32) or does it fall out with commonly accepted definitions of the book? This links to the seeming contradiction that lies between the repetition of the framework of the book in the wider discourse as an understood and recognisable object – hardback, paperback, eBooks, or audio, etc. – and the un-repeatability of new forms and uses of technology that have yet to become established as recognisable books.

Going back to Eliot and Rose, they state that a book is a text that has been “multiplied, distributed, or in some way made public” (2007, p. 3), but this definition lacks clarity in two key ways. Firstly, the issue of multiplication, distribution, and making it public must be scrutinised, as each of these elements limit the definition of a book. When a book is defined by being “in some way made public,” Eliot and Rose seem to discount those books that are printed and never made public at all, such as pulped books and private print runs that sit in a room, never shared. Bhaskar also disagrees with the usefulness of the phrase ‘to make public’ by claiming that the “weakness of such a view lies in the lack of clarity about making public” (2013, p. 168). When there is no clarification of what ‘making public’ means, then does the non-distributed item still retain the nomenclature of a book simply by virtue of being multiplied or in some way distributed? Likewise, would a single issue of a bespoke photography or picture book not be considered a book due to its lack of printed text, multiplication, public exposure, or distribution?

The single issue of a bespoke book that deteriorates the edges of Eliot and Rose’s definition is not the norm and can, perhaps, be glossed over in favour of the inclusivity their definition provides, where it can include print-on-demand and single edition prints. However, the second, more pressing issue with their definition deals with their lack of engagement with terms that specifically relate to technological advances or the sociality that, in many ways, is driving the current market. In their omission, Eliot and Rose are remaining conservative by keeping their definition from aging. But the vagueness which keeps this definition of the book alive and modern is also what makes their understanding of the book an umbrella term that prevents it from becoming contextually relevant when engaging with future technologies.

Where Eliot and Rose stop, Cope and Phillips step in, going a bit further, claiming that “A book is no longer a physical thing. A book is what a book does” (2006, p. 7). The question that follows from this is: what does a book do? According to Cope and Phillips, a book does two things:

• It has a characteristic textual, and thus, communicative, structure.
• It has book-like functions because it is defined, registered and recognised as a book. This means that, when we need to ‘do books’, it can be found in bibliographical listings, it is acquired through bookstores and libraries; and it can be referenced as books.

(2006, pp. 7–8)

This dual definition of what a book does creates areas of friction within itself, the most obvious of which is where Cope and Phillips mention the “characteristic textual, and thus, communicative structure.” Within this statement, there seems to be lacking a theoretical or practical link between a book’s textuality and its communicative structure. What is there to presuppose that a book’s text is communicative?

Cope and Phillips overstate the connection between these two elements by presuming that because the structure is textual is it also communicative; where, in fact, the communicative nature of a text is potential instead of actual. Again, we can use the example of the bespoke photography book used above, a book that was published but never read, or printed and then pulped without trying to sell a single copy. These examples show text in its potential to be communicative but also highlight that one does not necessarily lead to the other, meaning that an item can be a book in structure even if it is never communicated to any readers and, vice versa, it can also be a book if it is communicated to others but not structured as a book, as with audiobooks, podcast books, or serials.

In looking at their second point in what a book does, we must question the book-like functions they describe and whether they relate to a book’s function or the physicality of the book. Importantly, this raises questions on whether this definition of a book allows for new formats such as Keitai Shōsetsu, collaborative fiction, and social media writing, which, noticeably, lack some of the features mentioned above.

Cope and Phillips mention earlier that a book is “a structured rendition of text and possibly also images” (2006, p. 7), which they quickly narrow down as “extended text (of, say, more than twenty thousand words and/or twenty images)” (2006, p. 7). To truncate the length of text considered to be a book overlooks a wide array of genres, presentation styles, and eProductions that all, rightfully, should fall under the mantle of the book. By narrowing down the understanding of a text as it relates to their interpretation of a book, Cope and Phillips do not allow for an open and forward-thinking definition of what a book is and can be.

The role of innovative formats in defining a book

A traditionally published book that has been moved online, where comments on the text are allowed without altering the original book, does not in and o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction
• 1. What is a book?
• 2. Foucaultߣs archaeology and McLuhanߣs global village and rear-view mirror as analytic strategies
• 3. The creative possibilities of the book
• 4. The rise of the citizen author
• 5. The role of gender in the digitally social communities
• 6. Genre fiction is leading the way
• 7. The role of community in writing fiction online Social platforms as places where authors and readers meet
• 8. The power relationships of the book
• 9. Understanding and incorporating the contradictions around the book
• Index