Periodicals and Periodicity

            Summary:

• ·       The newspaper served a more rudimentary need than journals and in most cases it preceded them.  Newspapers were seen as a fragmented, less authoritative version of the book.  Nonetheless, they were an important news medium that allowed for international communication on important events.  For this reason, they flourished during the years following the printing press. In fact, they were arguably the first invention to arise after Gutenberg’s press.
• ·       The periodical soon superseded the book as the dominant form of text for intellectual exchange, social commentary, and entertainment in the age of Enlightenment and revolution, movements that emphasized popularization and debate.  It also superseded the book in terms of commercialization and consumerism.
•      The periodical was a modern European invention, a “civilian tool of Western empire-building” that non-Westerners came to employ for their own ends. It shaped languages, created canons, and forged identities along a broad spectrum of responses: neither mere imitation nor negation of Western values, nationalism, or technology. Sometimes, where cultural resistance to the letterpress book or commercialization was high, periodicals helped ease the introduction of print into aspects of non-Western culture.

        Comment:

       

I found it very interesting that the Tour de France was just an advertising ploy to increase readership and circulation in a cycling magazine. It worked, readership increased in tenfold and the Tour de France has been held annually ever since 1903.

        Question: 

·       The chapter states that “for constraints of serialization in mass-circulation magazines marketed as much to advertisers as readers, the rewards could be considerably more lucrative than book contracts” for authors.  Knowing what we learned in previous chapters about how books advertised for certain medicines, and that booksellers even sold these medicines in addition to the texts, I’m wondering: Why writing for magazines instead of books in that time would have been so much more lucrative?