well, insofar as book objects are concerned, this site is an interesting enough and kinda pretty (in layout terms) statement of what alot of folk i know have been saying for some time is the central impact of electronic publishing on print---a vaporization of the space for shitty design, the opening up of maybe new spaces in the context of which people will write and publishers publish with attention to the physicality of the medium:
Books in the Age of the iPad — Craig Mod
when i started the thread, i was interested in a wide range of implications mostly because it happened that the two main articles talked about a wide range of implications.
the central question that interested me was about the sociology of cultural consumption if you like---the system of critics/intermediaries who's function was to sort through cultural goods in the context of a relatively centralized production/distribution system in order to stratify reception by class across the operation of telling folk what is good and what is not...the ability to act as intermediary was for folk like pierre bourdieu a basic aspect of cultural power...if you have power in this area, you are in a position to impose your lists of favorites not only on producers of cultural goods but also on other critics working in the same area/space who have to use your list as a reference point (say) relative to which they differentiate themselves and their lists. both articles agree that this older system of cultural power is breaking down in part because of a decentralization of both production and distribution engendered by the web/electronic publishing. but it also goes further than that to a decentralization of the capacity to define areas of "legitimate" knowledge. this is the point at which i think things become interesting, and was the direction i initially had in mind for the thread.
who gets to say what philosophy is in this decentralized context for example?
what is literature in this context?
personally, i am interested in the possibilities this decentralization offers for blowing up outmoded, threadbare separations between types of knowledge, types of activity....but it's clear from the articles that not everyone sees the old ways of thinking as outmoded and even less the old modes of sorting information. at bottom, these worries seem to come down to personal matters for the authors of each of the two pieces...if x happens, what will become of my work? epstein is not worried about this so much; alpaugh is.