2 June 2014
I imagine my undergraduate professors would tell me that anything we make, including a book, is a social product. Perhaps they would tell me that society is itself a product of our capitalist economic paradigms, and that everything society creates is thus transitively economic in nature. Indeed, publishers are made up of people, sell books to people, and answer to shareholders who demand profits. The book is thus both an inherently social and inherently economic product. It is also a social and economic engine - one that drives individual reading, organizations formed around reading like book clubs, the retail book industry, and even other forms of media and industry, from film to Furbies.
