I was hoping for more from this, but I'm not sure what exactly. This straddled the line between academic and popular history/criticism, but it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. Worthwhile to read for those interested in communications thought, but moreso as a 'check in' for contemporary thoughts on the subject.

Jeff Jarvis's The Gutenberg Parenthesis: The Age of Print and Its Lessons for the Age of the Internet is a condensed history of the development and spread of printing from its beginnings to our present age of post print. But it is more than just at technological history, Jarvis also grapples with the way society changed and adapted to the possibilities of print. Alongside the history of the book and printing, Jarvis looks at key events, legal decisions or advancements of copyright and communication.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is divided into three parts. It begins by defining and then explaining what the Gutenberg Parenthesis is. Greatly simplified, it is the distribution of information in a physical medium from Gutenberg to the rise of the internet. Section two, the longest section, takes into this time period with chapters moving chronologically from the pre-printing age through Gutenberg and the development of the newspaper and electrification and industrializing of print. Section three, in more essayist chapters, explores where we are now and considers the future. (Yes there will still be books).

At it's heart this book explores distribution of knowledge and information. One of the major considerations is the act of gatekeeping, during the parenthesis those who controlled the print controlled what was distributed, but as we enter a post print world, those barriers are lessening.

Jarvis sees the future as a hopeful place where we can shape the world we want to see by maintaining and teaching the values most important. He argues that these are the humanities and by moving control of the Internet away from companies like Facebook.

It is still too soon to say what the internet has done or will do to us, but the question is still very much what can we do with it?

This book will be of interest to readers of book history, technology and society and communication.

This was an entertaining and informative read. I found myself sharing what I learned from this book with those around me. I recommend it to fans of good and highly readable non-fiction.

A book that will surely be relevant to all subsequent conversation about "mass" anything, a necessary supplement to those interested in the works of those like McLuhan and Postman that precede it, and a welcome addition to the conversation about where we are going and how to navigate our future course.

I absolutely enjoy learning about inventors, the stories behind their inventions, etc. This book describes the birth of the printing press - which revolutionized the world, the way she share thoughts and ideas, etc. I highly recommend - especially if you work in tech.

I enjoyed much of this book. While I found the writing somewhat more formal and less conversational than I usually like, the book was very readable and mercifully, Jarvis kept his sentences from going on interminably. However, amidst the formality of language, the writing would, at times, be delightfully conversational. There were also clever parenthetical remarks that helped me get to know the author a little. The history of the internet was also excellent. I did not agree with the author on some of the regulatory issues later in the book, but I felt that Jarvis clearly gave his reasoning, so I didn’t have to agree with him in order to enjoy the book. Thank you to Netgalley and Bloomsbury Academic for the digital review copy.

How bizarre! I have never seen anything like this as an ARC (print or ebook) before.
Every page was covered by large font warnings that this was a prepublication and was not to be shared.
And then, as I swiped to the next page (page numbers not givern, just ebook locations) it obviously skipped a couple pages, or more!
Thanks so much for an incomplete book! (/s) Maybe a third of the book is included here?
I downloaded it a 2nd time, to see if it had been corrected, and got the same useless partial content.

Note: ironically for a book about the age of print and lessons to take from it for the digital age, the digital proof for this was difficult to read - the PDF I downloaded had the uncorrected proof disclaimer diagonally across each page in way that made most of the text had to read, and this meant that on Kindle the book was entirely broken as all of the text that crossed over this disclaimer was missing. I did manage to read the book, but it wasn't always the easiest.

The Gutenberg Parenthesis is a book about the history of printing and what we might learn from it to take forward with the internet and media as it is, all through the lens of the idea that the age of printing revolutionised by Gutenberg's invention is closing. Short chapters lay out not only the history of printing, communication, and copyright, but also key scholarly debates about these areas (and Jarvis' own views on some of these). For the first part of the book, this is mostly in isolation, but later these discussions of print are woven with discussions of the internet, as Jarvis draws out comparisons (having said at the start that it isn't a return to history, but rather we can learn from it).

The overview of printing is interesting and the short chapters mean it is fairly accessible as an academic book. I expected more about the internet, and as someone who has read about both topics but more recently about the internet and issues arising from it, I felt like there could've been more in depth engagement with the internet and where print helps us view ideas relating to it, for example around the structure and form of ideas and discourse. The afterword talking about the book needing to be allowed to be a book still was a good thing to be raised, but there could've been more about the impact of the changing digital culture on renewed interest in print books and if that relates back to the book's thesis of the end of the Gutenberg age and what that means for the internet.