TY - THES
AU - Theodore George Striphas
AB - This dissertation explores the connections between and among three histories: the history of the communicative infrastructure of books (i.e., the apparatuses through which people communicate with/about books and distribute them); the history of book technologies (i.e., the range of technical devices associated with the objects called “books”); and the history of hierarchies of cultural value. It focuses specifically on the U.S. context, with an emphasis on the period 1965–2002. One critic has described this period as the “late age of print,” a term that signals the simultaneity of perpetuity and change with respect to the social, material, and economic relations through which books and their social uses are defined.

More specifically, this study explores the recent history of books in the U.S. by examining four particularly charged sites, each corresponding to one of the main chapters. The first of these engages discourses on ebooks. It explores how the connections among print-on-paper books, consumer capitalism, and legal definitions of private property bear upon recent measures to regulate the reproduction and sharing of ebook content. The next chapter intervenes into recent debates about large-scale retail “superstore” bookselling in the U.S. In addition to mapping these debates, it dwells on the conditions of possibility of large-scale retail bookselling while exploring the embeddedness of superstores in local histories and economies. The subsequent chapter focuses on “online” bookselling, by considering how an upsurge in demand for books after World War II led the book industry to devise complex codes and a sophisticated technical infrastructure allowing its many branches to engage in forms of “online” communication. It concludes by investigating the politics of “online” bookselling via the internet. The next chapter looks at Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. It unpacks the conditions whereby the Club has emerged as a highly visible and astonishingly popular phenomenon in the U.S. and assesses its politics as a cultural form touching the lives of millions of women. The concluding chapter culminates in a series of provocations for the field of Book History and the discipline of Communication Studies synthesized from the preceding chapters.
LA - English
M3 - Ph.D. Dissertation
N1 - Examines period from 1965-2002
N2 - This dissertation explores the connections between and among three histories: the history of the communicative infrastructure of books (i.e., the apparatuses through which people communicate with/about books and distribute them); the history of book technologies (i.e., the range of technical devices associated with the objects called “books”); and the history of hierarchies of cultural value. It focuses specifically on the U.S. context, with an emphasis on the period 1965–2002. One critic has described this period as the “late age of print,” a term that signals the simultaneity of perpetuity and change with respect to the social, material, and economic relations through which books and their social uses are defined.

More specifically, this study explores the recent history of books in the U.S. by examining four particularly charged sites, each corresponding to one of the main chapters. The first of these engages discourses on ebooks. It explores how the connections among print-on-paper books, consumer capitalism, and legal definitions of private property bear upon recent measures to regulate the reproduction and sharing of ebook content. The next chapter intervenes into recent debates about large-scale retail “superstore” bookselling in the U.S. In addition to mapping these debates, it dwells on the conditions of possibility of large-scale retail bookselling while exploring the embeddedness of superstores in local histories and economies. The subsequent chapter focuses on “online” bookselling, by considering how an upsurge in demand for books after World War II led the book industry to devise complex codes and a sophisticated technical infrastructure allowing its many branches to engage in forms of “online” communication. It concludes by investigating the politics of “online” bookselling via the internet. The next chapter looks at Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. It unpacks the conditions whereby the Club has emerged as a highly visible and astonishingly popular phenomenon in the U.S. and assesses its politics as a cultural form touching the lives of millions of women. The concluding chapter culminates in a series of provocations for the field of Book History and the discipline of Communication Studies synthesized from the preceding chapters.
PB - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
PY - 2002
EP - 348 pp.
TI - A Constellation of Books: Communication, Technology, and Popular Culture in the Late Age of Print
ER -