The Book Is Dead (Long Live the Book)

by Young, Sherman

• ISBN13: 9780868408040
• ISBN10: 0868408042
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-09-01
• Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
• More Book Details

Summary

The Book is Dead shows that even though more books are published every year, books died a while ago, long before the Internet. How can this be? Everyone thinks that the electronic media killed the book, but The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) argues that we did it ourselves. It shows that most books are not products of a book culture, keen to explore new ideas and take risks. The vast majority are anti-books; cynical marketing-driven printed objects designed to capitalise on whatever the spin doctors declare is hot. Fewer people are reading them and their impact on our world is diminishing. Sherman Young, passionate book lover and a digital consumer and producer, is on a mission to make book culture matter again. Shirking nostalgia and without apology, he investigates the economics and technological requirements of publishing, making a case for books and reading all the while. His bold and exciting book will inspire readers, non-readers and publishers to put books centre-stage again, even if they're not books as we now know them.

Author Biography

Sherman Young is a senior lecturer in the media department at Macquarie University in Sydney. He has written for numerous academic journals and presented papers at academic conferences both in Australia and overseas. He is a founding member of the editorial board of Scan, an online journal of media arts and culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Prologue	p. 1
The book is dead	p. 5
What is a book?	p. 21
Nobody reads	p. 43
Everybody writes	p. 67
What do publishers do?	p. 84
Objects of desire	p. 106
Reconfigurations	p. 126
The heavenly library	p. 150
Notes	p. 167
Select bibliography	p. 180
Index	p. 182
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.