Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print reframes the conventional narrative of bibliographic decline by rejecting the elegiac claim that digital media have rendered books obsolete, arguing instead that print persists within a transformed regime of circulation, commodification, and control. His central intervention is to demonstrate that contemporary book culture is not defined by the disappearance of books but by the reorganisation of their social infrastructure—the dense network of material, technical, legal, and institutional relations through which books are produced, distributed, exchanged, and rendered intelligible in everyday life. As the introduction makes clear, the “late age of print” names neither the death of print nor a nostalgic afterlife, but a transitional conjuncture in which books remain culturally prestigious even as their functions are increasingly mediated by new systems of logistical rationalisation, consumer management, and intellectual property control. Striphas’s originality lies in displacing attention from reading as an isolated interpretive act toward the broader politics of circulation: barcodes, ISBNs, chain bookstores, Amazonian distribution, Oprah’s Book Club, and Harry Potter piracy become diagnostic sites through which the politics of everyday book culture are made visible. These are not peripheral mechanisms but constitutive infrastructures through which books acquire their apparent normality and ubiquity. Particularly incisive is his claim that books were instrumental in consolidating twentieth-century consumer capitalism, yet now serve equally well as vehicles for its mutation into what, after Lefebvre, he terms a society of controlled consumption. In this emerging order, ownership yields to licensing, circulation becomes increasingly monitored, and consumer sovereignty is subtly displaced by systems of managed access and behavioural control. Striphas’s broader achievement, therefore, is to show that the enduring significance of books lies less in their textual content alone than in their capacity to illuminate the evolving logics of capitalist modernity. Books remain not relics of a superseded print era, but privileged instruments through which the changing conditions of culture, commerce, and control may be read with unusual precision.
Striphas, T. (2009) The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control. New York: Columbia University Press.
