Has the internet finally moved beyond book retailing into the culture of reading? One of the unexpected benefits of being given a Kindle this festive season is the positive contribution that it has made to the mounting book vs cat crisis that has recently developed in our house. Previous cats, Luther and Calvin were very respectful towards the printed word and reached the stage where you could rest a book on their backs while they sat on your lap. The current incumbents, Genghis and Kubla, are philistines. Genghis pins your arm down so that you can’t turn pages and Kubla steals bookmarks. They haven’t worked out that the Kindle is a book yet, leaving you able to read, make notes, add bookmarks and download new books from your armchair without disturbing the aforementioned tyrants.
This is doubly appreciated because the cat free refuge that was Borders is now closed, probably in the face of Amazon’s ability to resolve consumer problems through frictionless technology. Waterstones certainly seems to think that e-readers are culpable in their poor holiday sales figures. Jeff Bezos’ address to early adopters clearly states that the design brief was for “the Kindle to disappear in your hands” allowing the customer to “quickly forget that you are reading on an advanced wireless device and instead be transported into that mental realm readers love…” I still think the absence of fang marks in book covers is an essential marketing plus.
However, Bezos’ ability to turn an avowed luddite into a early adopter is through effective incentive. My device was ordered the Monday before the big freeze in Britain, left New York at lunch time and arrived in the midst of the snow 15 minutes before the third year’s Popular Fiction and Publishing exam. Before the exam started it was powered up, had welcomed me by name, downloaded Pride Prejudice and Zombies and was then used to while away invigilation. The students were dealing with these very pertinent issues:
Choose one of the following –
1. Account for the reasons why recommendation is such an important strategy for booksellers retailing an “experience commodity”.
2. Identify cultural values underlying Christmas sales strategies which target customers buying books as gifts.
3. Critically analyse the value placed on books for children in the context of contemporary publishing and bookselling.
4. To what extent is textual analysis as important to the study of the bestseller as an understanding of the cultural practices around reading?
I hope the Kindle provided some inspiration.
All this embracing of new technology during 2010 is there to seriously relaunch ARPF as a network. There is a lot of activity in our field of research but it is still dispersed across the interdisciplinary spectrum. Lack of funding has provided further incentive to move to electronic media. It allows both for archiving and alerts, which hopefully will serve many different interests and continue ARPF’s aim to make contact and promote exchange with diverse research communities and expertise.
The first announcement to make is the ARPF conference Popular Fictions: Selling Culture? 20th-21st November 2010. This should be a forum which accommodates more than just the debate about e-reading and considers the eighteenth and nineteenth century marketplace, other forms of entertainment media and the current political and commercial climate for popular narrative forms.
Updates on this page will be used to promote research in popular fiction studies by gathering relevant news and by directing users to the website’s features such as new publications (reviews where possible), conference cfps and reports, archives and research reports and network activities. The Kindle, I note, even promotes and supports blogging but I’m not sure that I can type one handed as the other is sure to be pinned down by one cat or another.
Nickianne Moody, ARPF Convenor, Liverpool John Moores University.
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