Comments on: What Makes a Book a Book? (A Working, Material-Operational Definition)

By: Amber

Amber — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:56:22 +0000

Ryan, I have worked all day and I came home to Hawkins puking. I am tired and don’t have much to say in response (certainly nothing intelligent) to your last few posts other than:

I am glad I read them and I am glad that you are out there figuring this stuff out for the rest of the world.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:33:51 +0000

BTW — if you aren’t already familiar with it (did we talk about this at the Brown?), Anthony Grafton’s “A History of the Footnote” is an absolutely magisterial bit of book history, and gets at some of the sorts of contestations of knowledge you’re looking at.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 16:28:28 +0000

So the question “what is a book?” isn’t really an answerable question. It’s perhaps not even an interesting question, because the answer will be — as it is with so many things — “definitions of the book are overdetermined.”

So perhaps then a slightly more interesting question is: “why are these components of my working definition of book-ness in tension with one another?” One could also ask “whose interests are represented in these various definitional components-in-tension?” but I think the answers, even extended ones, would be be fairly self-evident. I guess the angle I’d be most curious about would be something like, “In [context x], *how* do people argue about the definition of the book and reveal their competing self-interests in pushing their various definitional components-in-tension, and what does that process — that *how* — tell us about [context x]?”

By: cheryl

cheryl — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 14:40:25 +0000

sounds like an interesting start. Can’t wait to see where you take it!