Re: [Marxism] New title in the HM Book Series: Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record

[David Picón Álvarez <david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

OK, this is my last reply on this topic, as I believe the tone is getting 
out of hand (at least half of it is my fault) and I'm not sure it's entirely 
on-topic for the list in any event.

From: "John Thornton" <jthorn65@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> A book is the physical paper and ink. A book is not the information
> contained within. Books can have blank pages.

I completely disagree, and I think it's reasonable to do so. Books have 
historically passed through several different stages. They have been written 
on bark, parchment, papyrus, plastic. They've been written with all manners 
of inks, or simply written by perforations on sheets (braille). They were 
written as scrolls, codices, and probably other less successful form 
factors. As to books having blank pages, a blank page is still information 
(it can be conveyed through character number 12 in ASCII, for instance).

In fact, books are recognized as being "the same" across exemplars, copies, 
reprints, editions, different form factors. When someone shows a book and 
says "have you read this book?" they do not mean, usually, to ask if one has 
read that particular copy of the book, but whether one has read that same 
information in whatever format. People answer yes even if they've read an 
electronic copy.

To denote particular physical embodyments of books we have words like tome 
or volume. In fact the idea of a book is far from as simple as suggested, 
given collections of works that are themselves at least nominally divided 
into books and yet are printed and bound on a single volume.

[...]

Here you completely ignore my substantive point with respect to costs of 
reproduction (natural and human) of printed books, and prefer to address 
something which is completely unimportant.

> Funny, I didn't think of the quip as original.
> I considered it a formulaic as your comment about reactionaries.

Either you or I or both missed a sarcasm tag here. In any event, I think 
there is such a thing as reactionary thinking.

Elsewhere you say:

> What I objected to was the idea of bittorrent sharing as a replacement
> for libraries or the idea that this type of file sharing is somehow a
> "better" model for socialism than libraries.

I think there are a few reasons why this is essentially true. Mostly, 
libraries are and will always be limited by scarcity constraints to do with 
space, transportation, number of existing copies of a work, and the very 
cost of reproduction of making such copies. They are therefore organized as 
institutions to allocate and handle scarcity. BitTorrent on the other hand 
is organized to allocate and handle abundance. The costs of reproduction of 
works over bittorrent are near-zero, lower the more people who want to have 
the work (the inverse of libraries), and essentially constant. Those works 
are also, in many ways that matter, freed from the commodity form. So I 
don't see why you object so straneously to either statement. BT seems 
clearly, if not socialist, certainly post-capitalist.

--David.


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