I got a PhD in a social science (history) and worked for a year as a sociology acquisitions editor for an academic press, but could never quite figure out what sociology is, other than by reference to a particular list of works generally recognized as its canon. That is, I couldn’t say what makes sociology, as a whole, distinct enough that its various practitioners couldn’t be easily packed off, by their university employers, to new offices in departments of history, anthropology, political science, or, in a few cases, economics. I’m talking about method here, not focus - that is, in what distinct and useful ways sociology is done, that justifies it being its own thing.

O.k., I could define it in a negative fashion - and I don’t mean, “Sociology is not [x] because its practioners don’t do [y].” Rather, I’d have said that it’s defined mostly by the things it does worse than other disciplines, when treating like topics. Among sociology works treating historical topics, too many struck me as anachronistic - specifically, present-ist - in their approach, while among those treating culture-focused topics, too few did a good job of appreciating and accounting for the significance of cultural specificities. And in too many instances, scientism, or rather “numberism,” is to blame - sociologists, for me, seemed too quick to focus on problems that can be studied with a quantitative approach, or use such an approach when another, qualitative approach would be more appropriate. Also there is the unfortunate dominance, in the field as a whole, of the political blunderbusses of the “There is poverty and America sucks” school.

But maybe you haven’t read much sociology, and are still curious about it - yet you’re as busy as anyone, and won’t get to that Max Weber anthology anytime soon. Lucky you, I say: here’s all of sociology, in four easy lessons, on a single web page.

Over at Boing Boing, the inimitable Paul Spinrad, riffing on one of my posts, makes a flip - but still very-on-point - suggestion that since hardcovers function essentially as advertising for book publishers, publishers should simply replace them with… ads.

He suggests billboards in Times Square, and has a lot of fun with that. Fun bits aside - Greek columns astride the billboards - it’s not a bad idea, and certainly a better business model than publishing hardcovers at a huge loss.

But I wonder if billboards would really work, in the same way hardcovers do- which doesn’t have much to do with the economics of the various transactions, narrowly drawn, that are involved in making and selling books. For the publishing and book-writing crowd, billboards wouldn’t have anywhere near the symbolic valence as a stack of hardcover books, in an (ideally “independent”) bookstore. That is, they wouldn’t serve, in multiple contexts, as a sign of “seriousness” - of the publisher (to the author), of the author (to bookbuyers), and of the reader (to his friends, who see the book on his coffeetable or bookshelf).

I can’t think of another, single medium that could pull off all three of these tricks. Which is likely why, economic considerations aside, hardcovers still exist.

But let’s assume that economic considerations being what they are, publishers eventually decide that hardcovers’ symbolic power isn’t worth the cost. Of the three parties to the book-making and -consuming process, which will be left symbolically deprived, once hardcovers are replaced by something else?

Readers! To publishers, hardcovers are important primarily because they impress writers - that is, the ones who write profitably sellable/prestigious books. When a house publishes a writer in hardcover, it shows him - and other writers, most of whom think long and hard about such things - that here is a publisher who will treat my work with respect, in time-honored fashion, and do what it takes to make my work respected by others, and, not incidentally, ensure that it lasts for the ages. Certainly hardcovers impress readers as well. But without saleable/highly respected authors, who are a very rare commodity, publishers can’t dream of reaching readers - or rather, selling enough books to them, to make a living. So I think writers are the primary consumers in the symbolic market for hardcover books.

And unfortunately for the billboard scheme, I don’t think billboards would quite make the nut for them. Advertising, after all, is just so crass…

Unless, of course, it’s advertising on PBS! Which is the perfect way, I think, for publishers to reach - and impress! - authors, once hardcovers are gone. And how much does an ad on the Lehrer News Hour cost? Peanuts, I’m guessing, compared to a Times Square billboard. All the better! John Houseman’s as dead as big book publishing’s business model, unfortunately, so you couldn’t film him in a Harvard Club-style chair, in the Harvard Club, holding the book, saying, “You go into this book with a mindful of mush, and you come out of it thinking like a writer.” But I’m sure another suitable actor could be found. William Hurt is old now, right? Everybody knows he’s smart, and while he doesn’t have a quasi-British accent, he did once play an Ivy League professor in a movie. Also, I’m guessing that these days, he’ll work cheap - which will be key, since for Book Industry 2.0, cheap will be the new wasteful! Anyway, once those ads start running, no one will thinking about money - they’ll be thinking about books, and nothing but. And while hardcovers may still be missed, they’ll hardly be mourned.

I’ve written before that the iPhone could be a Kindle killer, because it provides arguably as good a reading experience, is cheaper, and does a whole lot of other things the Kindle doesn’t do. The release of the “Kindle for iPhone” app shows that Amazon has recognized this, and likely understands too that any number of other devices, current and future, could present as tough or tougher challenges to its effort to dominate the ereader device space. So it’s doing the smart thing, and starting to reposition itself as more of an e-content retailer. The app is free, though to get it, you need an Amazon account, via which you can then buy e-books etc., using the mobile Safari browser. Which is to say, Amazon wants to get the app to as many iPhone users as possible, so it can direct them to Amazon’s website, where they’ll spend their cash. Something like Amazon’s iTunes, in short, though Apple primarily uses iTunes to sell hardware, with content sales a secondary concern; for Amazon, ultimately, the emphasis should be on the latter.

How about the quality of the Kindle for iPhone reading experience? I haven’t used it yet, but I’m encouraged to see that, among other things, the app will sync a user’s bookmarks across devices. Still to come, I hope, is the ability easily to read other formats, including EPUB.

Amazon’s already very good at selling text content in physical form, and has huge name recognition and credibility in that space. Ten years from now, when free Kindle reading apps are everyone, it will likely also be the leading retailer of e-content – and it won’t let a little thing like the Kindle stand in its way.

So asks Dan Visel over at if:book’s blog. He’s talking about the way both Kindle and the Sony Reader full-justify text, leaving odd-looking spaces between words, something that doesn’t usually happen - or anyway doesn’t strike the eye - when printers full-justify on paper. Visel has a point, but he could have taken his argument further. Poorly laid out text is a symptom of a larger problem with ereaders. Reading onscreen has a lot of advantages over reading on paper - easy access to supplementary materials, easier navigation around a text and between texts, and so forth. But reading itself isn’t, in the main, as pleasant onscreen as on paper. Certainly there are technical obstacles to overcome here, the need for better screens chief among them. I suspect, though, that this problem’s real source might have to do with these devices, and their software, being designed by people who just don’t read that much, and so haven’t thought a great deal about what a great reading experience is, and how an ereader could provide one. I can’t say this is true - I don’t know anything about the people who designed the Reader, the Kindle, or the various other ereaders out there. But my (admittedly limited) experience using ereaders sure makes me wonder about this.

Jacob Grier says yes.

Notes toward an insider’s history of online publishing: the latest installment of Levi Asher/Marc Stein’s memoir.

Pat Holt has an idea to save trade-book publishers: they publish titles in softcover right away, not bothering with a hardcover, save in special cases. She points out that some houses tried this in the 80s, aiming to market “their young, unproven authors to young, adventurous readers.” I could be wrong about this, but I think she’s talking about Vintage, and books like Bright Lights, Big City. Right? Anyway, her point is a good one - hardcovers cost too much to make and buy, and publishers need to cut cut cut costs anyway they can. Especially since readers really don’t care if a book’s a hardcover or softcover, unless we’re talking about a coffeetable book or something else that’s meant to be a keepsake. But reading her post makes me wonder, why, in 2009, is this even still an issue? Is book publishing really still this backward?

Check out Clay Shirky’s post on the idea that micropayments for content might save traditional publishers. He makes the same points I made in my post on the same topic, but his is more fun to read, because it’s full of zingers a la:

[S]mall payment systems are always discussed in conversations by and for publishers, readers are assigned no independent role. In every micropayments fantasy, there is a sentence or section asserting that what the publishers want will be just fine with us, and, critically, that we will be possessed of no desires of our own that would interfere with that fantasy.

Kindle 2.0 is here, and it’s… err… well… imagine an iPod that didn’t play mp3 files. That’s how I think of the Kindle, given that it still can’t handle .epubs - even though, as Levi Asher notes, .epub “seems to be emerging as the much-needed industry-wide digital publishing format.”

There’s been a ton of press about the Kindle since the first version was released, but Amazon hasn’t provided any actual sales figures, and that can’t be a sign that the thing is selling well. I have a sense that in publicizing the Kindle, Amazon’s decided to play to its strengths, taking advantage of the facts that 1) the tech press loves novelty, 2) journalists of all sorts want there to be a device that “saves reading,” and 3) everyone is awed by Amazon’s track record, in creating a business out of nothing. Also, 4) Jeff Bezos does a killer “I’m just a supersmart nerdy bald guy who’s changing the world.” This strategy has worked - Kindle coverage has focused on its being somehow morally “good” (because it will “save reading”), while overlooking such problems as its technical shortcomings and Amazon’s decision not to support a number of ebook formats, and not questioning Amazon’s assertions that device and Kindle-format ebook sales are strong.

But at some point, the bloom will come off the rose, as more “real” journalists start to ask hard questions about the thing, and especially about those sales numbers - questions that for now, are coming mostly from bloggers. And as the iPhone and other devices move toward supporting a far greater range of formats, and offer more functionality than the Kindle, those sales numbers, whatever they are, might well crater. At which point, we’ll find out if Amazon really cares about selling Kindles, and is thus willing to make it into the device it should be. It’s not like the company’s short on cash, for goodness sake! And if that doesn’t happen, we’ll know that Amazon’s just using the Kindle project as a way to piss on the epublishing space, as it were - to get publishers used to providing their epublished content via the Amazon store, and get readers used to buying it there. In order, forever after, to make hay while sticking with its core business, which is selling content.

Would you pay to read Time online? No. That’s the problem with Walter Isaacson’s suggestion that big media launch a micropayment system, to charge readers a small amount, billed automatically to their credit cards, each time they read an article online. Levi Asher gives Isaacson credit for creativity, but adds that he doesn’t think the proposal would work, because online ad sales already give publishers a way to monetize this content. Good point, though the bigger issue is one neither man addresses: whether Time’s content is worth paying for. Certainly it was, back when print media only had to compete with TV and radio, and both barriers to entry were so high, for anyone looking to get into either print or broadcasting. But that’s no longer the case. And it’s easy enough to find free content that’s as good or better - as or more informative, providing as or more interesting opinions - as anything Time runs. Isaacson, I think, has come a little way out of the midtown bubble, but not far enough - not far enough, anyway, to see that most professional journalists can’t compete on price with bloggers and unpaid citizen-reporter types. He think they’re uniquely talented both at finding stuff out and writing about it, and wants to find a way to support them in this work. He’s coming at the problem wrong, I think - the challenge is to find great content and get it to people who want it, not support an outdated content-production model, on the assumption it’s the only way to meet this challenge.