Computer games are especially vulnerable to this because theylive and breathe through the platform. But something rathersimilar is happening today to fiction as well.... What you seein science fiction nowadays is an amazing tonnage of productthat is shuffled through the racks faster and faster.... If ascience fiction paperback stays available for six weeks, it's amiracle. Gross sales are up, but individual sales are off...Science fiction didn't even used to be *published* in book form,when a science fiction *book* came out it would be in an editionof maybe five hundred copies and these weirdo Golden Age SF fanswould cling on to every copy as if it were made of platinum....But now they come out and they are made to vanish as soon aspossible. In fact to a great extent they're designed by theirlame hack authors to vanish as soon as possible. They're clichesbecause cliches are less of a cognitive load. You can write awhole trilogy instead, bet you can't eat just one...Nevertheless they're still objects in the medium of print. Theystill have the cultural properties of print.
Culturally speaking they're capable of lasting a long timebecause they can be replicated faithfully in new editions thathave all the same properties as the old ones. Books areindependent of the machineries of book production, the platformsof publishing. Books don't lose anything by being reprinted by anew machine, books are stubborn, they remain the same work ofart, they carry the same cultural aura. Books are hard to kill.MOBY DICK for instance bombed when it came out, it wasn't untilthe 1920s that MOBY DICK was proclaimed a masterpiece, and thenit got printed in millions. Emily Dickinson didn't even publish