<synthesis> books / readers under lockdown

[Krystian Woznicki]

Hi INC-folks,

during the pandemic-related shutdown/lockdown period web and platform
industries are experiencing a high. Unsurprisingly, digital capitalism's
magic moment is intertwined with overall fear and panic, clouding the
reason of many critics, also in the context of digital/networked culture
debates. Magdalena Taube and myself have argued elsewhere (see:
https://tinyurl.com/y9lvzrwm) that this is the moment for more
energetically than ever reviving criticism and exploring alternatives. A
special problem – initially not discussed in our aforementioned
contribution – is the case of books under proprietary lockdown:
commercial platforms for 'e-reading' or 'social reading' have been using
the 'corona crisis' to revamp their 'temporary free trial offers' into
ostensibly 'social initiatives' promoting something like 'open access.'
One example would be Scribid. In other words, books under proprietary
lockdown – suddenly seemingly liberated – have been offered to readers
under lockdown. Obviously, the underlying calculus is, that, once the
readers are liberated again (freed from lockdown), the books can be put
under lockdown again, making readers pay for them from then on.

One could argue, that many businesses did not even need to trick people
– in this cheap way – into heavier web-usage and web-service-dependency,
as there are not too many alternatives around. Did 'we' actually have a
choice? And yet, the question needs to be asked: What kind of
initiatives from within the sphere of critical public libraries and open
access have emerged or been rediscovered in the past two, three months?
How are business models of rather proprietary-oriented publishers being
recast towards more commonist ends?    

I hope that these questions are not too off-topic for this list. I am
just curious what people on this list think about these issues and what
they have observed or even researched with regard to them. At the end of
the day, given that INC is hosting an extensive public access book
series (https://networkcultures.org/publications/) and has recently also
issued 'The Urgent Publishing Toolkit,' this might eventually be not
that far off as it might seem at first glance.   

By the way:

One example for a small initiative is the Berlin-based publishing
collective bbooks that started a sharing initiative, making available
two of their titles online, German translations of "Torpor" by Chris
Kraus and "Marx’ Philosophie" by Étienne Balibar. Have a look here:
http://b-books.de/share.htm

Moreover, I recently came across a few books that were made available
for 'free reading' in the course of the latest Black Lives Matter
uprisings, including the following two titles:

Distributed Blackness
http://opensquare.nyupress.org/books/9781479820375/

FUTURES OF BLACK RADICALISM (see e-book section)
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism
 
Best wishes,

Krystian

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