Reviewing Ted Striphas's The Late Age of Print at The Critical Flame, Richard Nash evokes Walter Benjamin's Angel of History to explain the publishing industry's atavistic, storm-chased state.

"The angel would like to stay," Benjamin writes, "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

In The Late Age of Print, Striphas traces publishing's part in the creation of consumer culture, showing how the seeds of the current "crisis" were sown in part by cultural capitalists who sought to create demand and produce artificial scarcity in the literary realm. Amazon's recent summary "take-back" of digital editions of Orwell's works from stunned Kindle users is only partially an artifact of the new world of the digital; it's also another point on the publishers' inexorable path towards controlling readers.

The trouble with the nostalgic angel is tragically evoked by storied publishing executive Joni Evans in "When Publishing Had Scents and Sounds," her reminiscence in yesterday's New York Times, which Richard tweeted about yesterday. "We did not notice Charles Darwin slip inside the doors of Simon & Schuster and take a seat in our reception area," Evans begins. But as Richard pointed out in his tweet, Darwin is always in the room.

And furthermore, publishing still has scents and sounds. The aroma of dark roast coffee has replaced the tang of Lucky Strikes, and the robotic whirr of inkjets rises where the ker-thlunk of mimeography once clamored. The scent-trails don't lead back to some long-lost Eden, but only to the angel's ever-growing pile of debris.

If the culture of letters is to thrive, we must remember that technology is ever only so much stuff for the angel's trash heap. It's never the technology, but what we choose to do with it, that generates the storm. The public sphere's terms-of-service, the product of five hundred years of cultural contest, are a better deal than anything Facebook, Amazon, or Google Books has to offer. To keep them current in the digital age, as Richard suggests, we must turn around and face front.