Digital Bibliography

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books as material instantiations of negotiated interests. That’s the short version, of course, but it’ll do for now. I’ve been especially interested in how specific interests (like readers, authors, publishers, genre expectations, etc) affect a book’s physical form.

This morning, I ran across this blog entry from Charles Stross. It’s exactly what I’ve been looking for. What it lacks in documentation and research, it more than makes up for in clarity and first-hand author experience. His reflections and speculations range from the historical impact of supermarket wire racks, to differences between binding conventions (hardcover/softcover) in the US and the UK, to reading habits related to plot structure. Stross overtly and explicitly reminds his readers that his entry is only intended to apply directly to fantasy and/or sci-fi fiction. Here’s a quotation that represents the entry pretty well:

The mass market for paperbacks prior to 1991 was dominated by wholesalers who supplied retail stores — not bookshops, but local supermarkets with wire-mesh book racks. The wholesalers knew their markets intimately, and would match mass-market titles to the supermarket customers on the basis of their clientelle — SF/F was popular near technical schools, for example. When the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s forced publishers to raise their cover prices, the distributors pushed back and demanded that if the product cost more, it had to be bigger — not taller or wider, else it wouldn’t fit the racks, but fatter.

But as I read it, I kept wondering how his piece might inform my own understanding about the length of scholarly texts. I’m specifically thinking about journal articles, edited collections, and scholarly monographs in the humanities (most interested in Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship, though). Read the rest of this entry »