Step 1: Create Artifical Scarcity; Step 2: ???; Step 3: Profit!

In a truly inspired pairing, The Critical Flame has Richard Nash review The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas:

Worse still, the product they are pushing is continually subject to ever more elaborate restrictions. When there is oversupply, Striphas argues, a publisher has two options, 1) seek to induce demand, largely by publicity and advertising, or 2) create artificial scarcity. The former, we’ve discussed; to achieve the latter, he sees a century of publishers resorting to complex, quixotic arrangements ranging from disparate territorial rights to elaborate security arrangements — the latter most famously in the cases of the Harry Potter books, the lengths to which its publishers and author went to manage it being the subject of an entire chapter. Perhaps the oddest to us now, though, having grown accustomed to the perversity of the security measures applied to the Harry Potter laydowns, might be the ruses of the 1920’s when a secondary move of Bernays’s was to launch a competition with the public for a suitable word, akin to “scofflaw” with which to chastize people who borrowed books from friends or libraries, rather than buy them (“Booksneak” won).

The fact that this book has gotten almost no traction in the old media is just another indication of that media’s increasing irrelevance in literary matters. If you’re interested at all in where publishing’s been and where it’s headed, read the review, then read the book.

And while you’re at it, have a look at my review of this book, as well as my interview with the author.

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