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68 Consuming Media

the other hand, the perishability of paper can be compensated for through storage on
microfiche. The extent of the distribution in space is highly varied: from a national
perspective one can distinguish between, on the one hand, print media that are avail-
able in principle for everyone in the country – for example the largest morning and
evening papers and some magazines and books – and on the other hand, less available
print media such as local newspapers, more exclusive magazines and books that lack
nation-wide distribution. Yet another possible categorization is by genre. In this way,
one can place newspapers and some magazines and books in the macro genre infor-
mation/ analysis/debate, though many of these media, both in terms of content and
form, are increasingly mixed with entertainment. Correspondingly, many periodicals
and books can be classified as entertainment. None of these criteria offer an unam-
biguous distinction between newspapers, magazines and books, as all criteria flow into
one another.
So what are the characteristics of print media as commodities, compared to other
media circuits? One thing that books, newspapers and magazines have in common is
that they contain visible text and images already at the time of purchase, something
that distinguishes them from, for example, videos and CDs, whose use requires some
kind of hardware. It is thus possible to claim that print media are autonomous or
single media, circulated and used without any necessary additional technological
support. Another characteristic of print media is their specific materiality: the paper
and the ink. Through their materiality, paper books, dailies and magazines – unlike
web ‘papers’, e-zines and broadcast media – are products that demand a much more
concrete physical transportation across space.
For readers, the materiality might have specific dimensions. For example, when
Celal, a 28-year-old Kurdish man born in Turkey, talks about reading newspapers
from his native country, he attributes a special significance to the smell of the printer’s
ink: ‘When I buy Hürriet I smell the ink and my fingers become black, which is not
the case with Swedish papers … I have to smell that smell, perhaps to some extent I
feel like, okay, I have not cut my contact with home.’ Print media products have both
tactile and visual aspects. In both the newsagents and the bookshop, customers touch
the products all the time. Through their availability on display, media products can
be held and examined: is it four-colour print on glossy paper? How small or large is
the print? Is the book bound in leather, in paperboards or is it a paperback? What
does the blurb say and what are the headings in the table of contents? What articles
and pictures are found in the magazine? In the bookshop, unlike on the Internet,
customers can touch and leaf through the books. The tactile and visual dimension of
moving around among the products, among the material objects, is a competitive
advantage of bookshops in face of e-trade.
However, in spite of all the similarities between media constituting this circuit,
there is one criterion that distinguishes newspapers and magazines from books, and
that is periodicity. There are daily newspapers, periodicals published weekly, monthly
or less often, but still clearly regularly, whereas books, with some exceptions, are not
submitted to demands of periodicity. 6