{"id":1175,"date":"2008-02-01T16:48:12","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T16:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=1175"},"modified":"2008-02-01T16:48:12","modified_gmt":"2008-02-01T16:48:12","slug":"books_are_social_vectors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2008\/02\/01\/books_are_social_vectors\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;books are social vectors&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some choice quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s terrific new <i>Harper&#8217;s<\/i> essay, <a href=\"http:\/\/harpers.org\/archive\/2008\/02\/0081907\">&#8220;Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading&#8221;<\/a> (unfortunately behind pay wall):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.<br \/>\n&#8230;I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature -?\u009d art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some choice quotes from Ursula K. Le Guin&#8217;s terrific new Harper&#8217;s essay, &#8220;Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading&#8221; (unfortunately behind pay wall): Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,1576,1736],"tags":[2232],"class_list":["post-1175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reading","category-social_software","tag-books-reading-social_software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}