A critical remark is that in becoming ‘free’ as consumer we barter away power and freedom in the workplace or in the political arena in exchange for more private contentment (Slater 1997, 27).
Unlimited and never-ending consumer needs
The idea of insatiable need is bound up with notions of cultural modernization: the increased productivity of modern industry is a response and a spur to the capacity of people’s desires to become increasingly sophisticated, refined, and personal, as well as people’s desire to advance themselves socially and economically.
On the other hand, commercial society is systematically dependent on the insatiability of needs. Therefore, the market society fears the possibility that needs might be satisfied. To counter these fears, society develops demand management strategies and advertising, marketing and promotion.
Cultural contradictions arises: economic modernization underpinned by regime of rational planning and discipline and a work ethic, yet it depends upon fostering irrational desires and passions and a hedonistic ethic(Slater 1997, 28).
Negotiating identity and status within a post-traditional society
Modern concepts of individualism sweep away the possibility and desirability of fixed status order, characteristic of feudal times. In a post-traditional society, social identity must be constructed by individuals because it is no longer given or ascribed.
Goods can always signify social identity, but in the fluid processes of a post-traditional society, identity seems to be more a function of consumption rather than as in the feudal society where social order and identity dictate consumption patterns.
Consumer culture is crucially about the negotiation of status and identity. Regulation of these issues by tradition is replaced by negotiation and construction, and consumer goods are crucial to the way in which we make up our social appearance, our social networks, our structure of social values (Slater 1997, 29).
Modern exercise of power
Consumer culture is awash with signs, images, publicity. This involves an anesthetization of commodities and their environment. Consumption becomes a privileged site of autonomy, meanings, subjectivity, privacy and freedom.
Yet, all these meanings around consumption become crucial to economic competition and rational organization, become the objects of strategic action by dominating institutions. The sense of autonomy and identity comes under threat. Hence the controversy over whether consumption is a sphere of manipulation or freedom (Slater 1997, 31).
Introduction to Book publishing
We speak of book publishing as an industry and as a profession. Both designations are certainly appropriate. Book publishing is a business conducted, for the most part, for profit. But its practitioners have motivation that transcended their profit interest. They know that books are no more commodity, no mere items for consumption that leave their readers much as they find them. Dessauer describes “books, like other vehicles of information and sources of entertainment, can change influence or depress those who expose themselves to them. What books are and can be depends heavily on the judgment, integrity, taste and acumen of those who select and produced them” (Dessauer 1990, 13).
The publishers play a vital role not only in the marketing place but within the cultural and civilization of which they are a part and what makes book publishing a profession as well as business is the conscious pursuit by publishers of their responsibilities.
Reading itself is a habit that will differ greatly in nature and character from one individual to the next. Students read and buy book because they must or enjoy the experience and acquired the lifelong habit of doing so. Professionals like accountants, engineers and scientists who wish to keep up with developments in their filed read and buy books in substantial number. Therefore, there are majority of people consume books. It can be said the range of books consumption is so wide and diverse.
Book publishing Process
Book publishing process could be divided into three phrases: “manuscripts preparation”, “magazine printing” and “magazine promotion”(Li 1996, 9).
Manuscripts preparation
The manuscripts preparation phrase begins when an idea is judged worthy of being committed to writing.
“The important of point of an idea, from a book publishing of view, is that it is judged to be worthwhile to write about. When so judge, that idea ushers in the publishing process” (Li 1996, 9).
With clearer and faster communication, the manuscripts produced is better integrated and needs much shorter gestation period.
Book printing
Compare to manuscripts preparation, book printing is capital intensive. The steps are highly automated, with high-tech equipment playing a major role.
Book promotion
While the book is still in press, promoting it becomes the focus of attention. When copies are delivered from the printing contractors, the book promotion phrase being in earnest. Promoting the book begins with introducing it to the trade, prospecting the media for exposure, and presenting it to the reading public. It continues with cultivating business relationships with various links in the distribution chain, and flourishes with making sales and collecting sales proceeds. Advantage in book promotion might include “more focused promotion, more proprietary interest, more non-business contacts, more intimate promotion and longer shelf life for books” (Li 1996, 19).
History and Development
In this section I wish to look at several areas, starting with the history of books before moving onto the aspects of book publications.
Book in History
Books have existed for a considerable amount of time.
“The format of book as we know them dates from the first century A.D. when the codex, a volume of parchment pages bound on one side, was introduced” (Dessauer 1990, 17).
The timing of the movement was also beneficial to publishers; photocopiers were more readily available, meaning that once a publication had been created, it had a relatively cheap and accessible means of being reproduced for a potentially considerable audience.
“It should be noted that the uniformities progressively decline with change in technical capacity which allow greater products variety and differentiations to be built into production runs (Featherstone 1991, 96)”.
These factors that could then have an impact upon the world of publishing.
“Book in one form or another are as old as civilization. We encounter them in ancient Mesopotamia as clay tablets and in ancient Egypt as papyrus roll (Dessauer 1990, 17)”.
Many people shared a growing belief that they could acquire learning through reading. Large numbers of new readers had come into the fold. Lower education had been upgraded and higher education expanded to a larger segment of the population with related advances in book consumption.
Content
The diversity of content is one of the most striking features of books. It is commonplace for a book to also include articles on films, books, short stories and pieces on the producer's life. Art and drawings are also an important part of many books. Books publishing have to be aware of the demands of the market, their competition and advertisers. Articles must primarily be written with their audience in mind. The content of books is primarily prompted from what the writer themselves is interested in; it is merely hoped that after the book has been printed, there will be a significant amount of other people sharing the same interests that would be interested in a publication covering them.
Distribution
The area of distribution is where the majority of books experience the less problems with proper adverting skills are used.
A Cultural Industry
Book publishing, as we have noted, is both a cultural activities and a business. Books are vehicles of “idea, instruments of education, vessels of literature and sources of entertainment” (Dessauer 1990, 31). But the task of bring them into existence and of purveying them to their readers is a commercial one requiring all the resources and skills of the manager and entrepreneur.
It is appropriate to describe book publishing as a cultural industry. The theater, file and record business that share these characteristics can be similarly defined. It is important to recognize the dual character and demands of book publishing and of similar enterprises because their success depends on it. Both the environment in which they function and the qualification of their practitioners reflect this duality: “in both instances we must consider cultural and business requirement if our enterprise is to flourish” (Dessauer 1990, 31).
Consumer Culture
According to Don Slater, consumer culture is a “multidisciplinary field which converges on the idea that, in all human societies, consumption has an essentially cultural structure, and is central to the cultural as well as material reproduction of social lives and relationships” (Slater 1997, 11).
Consumer culture generally refers to the way in which consumption is organized within modern capitalist societies over the modern period. In a consumer culture consumption by and large takes the form of consuming commodities, goods obtained through market exchange rather than produced for direct use.
Karl Marx suggested that under capitalism social relationships between human beings are distorted to appear as if they are relationships between things. However, in reality, commodities are not just useful things, they also possess the social characteristics of workers’ own labour, and reflect the social relationships of production.
Meanings of commodities are powerful, and they motivate the consumer to purchase a particular commodity. To buy a particular book suggests the kind of image and status want to portray to others. In this sense, all commodities have their own symbolic-value, as well as their particular “use-value” (utility) and “exchange-value” (price) (Featherstone 1991, 96).
The meanings are socially constructed, that is, subject to deliberation and manipulation. Contrary to the neoclassical conception, consumers are not sovereign, and their preferences are not private, free and rational. Equally, it is too simplistic to suggest that manufacturers, distributors and advertisers manipulate consumers, since they work within an existing social norms and conventions of needs and meanings.
Book Publishing and the Consumer Society
There are relationship of book publishing to the consumer society.
Book publishing is production of consumption. There are several dimensions to book publishing’s production: book publishing has a high speed of turnover; book publishing as an industry is capital intensive with high-tech equipment playing a major role.
Book publishing is associated with questions of signification, or meanings associated with commodities. The study of book publishing informs much of the wider relationship of the individual and the commodity.
Book publishing is perceived as a form of communication, a particularly accident-prone form of communication.
“On the cultural dimension of the economy, the symbolization and use of material goods as “communication” not just utilities” (Featherstone 1991, 94).
How can we relate consumer culture to book publishing?
The most central theme is the concept of ‘needs’, which explores the social relation between private life and public institutions. Ways of thinking about this relation can be further grouped into “cultural reproduction and identity” (Slater 1997, 9).
Needs are both social and political in this respect too. Throughout the modern period the assumption has been that social production should ultimately be accountable to social values. All objects of consumption are meaningful implicates them “in a wider field of cultural reproduction” (Slater 1997, 10). The most private act of consumption animates “public and social systems of signs”, not necessarily in the “sense of public display” but more fundamentally through the process of cultural reproduction (Slater 1997, 9).
Consumer culture is a story of struggle over the everyday partly because it connects up with the social field of identity. Objects of consumption are always culturally meaningful and have been used at all times to culturally reproduce social identities.
Lifestyle change throughout the life, it might be reshaped by television, magazine and books influence. Hence the new lifestyle formed.
New hero of consumer culture make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experience, appearance and bodily dispositions they begins to gather into a lifestyle (Featherstone 1991, 95).
Consumer culture publicity suggests emphasize room for “self-improvement” and “self-expression” (Featherstone 1991, 95). It persuades consumer there is a room for improvement.
Book is central to the design, manufacture, distribution, sale and consumption. Book not only a matter of creation, consumption and identity, it is also a matter of production.
Book publishing play an important role in designating and maintaining social relationships facilitate business relationships. Like the author might arrange a meeting with publisher discussing the marketing of the book. All these activities need a good communication skill. Publisher have no understanding at all of just how much effects goes into writing a book, authors cannot assume that everyone read their books, so they need to maintain good relationship with public as well as the business field.
Book publishing also facilitates individuals to express their values and make public statements about self-image and personal identity. What author could write? It may be anything. Ideas are everywhere. Li notes “Ideas are results of stimulation, interaction and reflection” (Li 1996, 20).
Book enables people to express their feelings about relationships with other. Something new such as discovery or a person’s untold life story can reflect author’s feeling in legally fixed status.
In book publishing, once technology improves, there are more variety of products and mass production. It is what Featherstone describes “Mass production or the logic of capitalism” (Featherstone 1991, 93)
As I mentioned before, there are wide range of group of people consume books, lifestyle are different between different group of people in different social status. Book publishing creates and consumes cultural goods at the same time.
“The internal avant-grade dynamic of artistic modernism creates a new supply of accredited cultural goods, while the eternal dynamic of the consumer market-place itself generates a popular demand for rare artistic goods” (Featherstone 1991, 99).”
Finally, by the change of technology , as well as to the central theme of the concept of ‘needs’,book publishing can be said to have been part of consumer culture.
References
Dessauer, J.P. (1990). Book publishing: a basic introduction. New York: Continuum.
Featherstone, M. (1991). Consumer culture and postmodernism. London: Sage Publications
Li, D.H. (1996). All-by-yourself self-publishing. Bethesda, Md.: Premier Pub.
Slater, D. (1997). Consumer culture and modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
