Book wars : the digital revolution in publishing

Book wars The digital revolution in publishing

John B. Thompson

Book - 2021

"This book tells the story of the turbulent decades when the book publishing industry collided with the great technological revolution of our time. From the surge of ebooks to the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks, Book Wars provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of technological disruption in one of our most important and successful creative industries. Like other sectors, publishing has been thrown into disarray by the digital revolution. The foundation on which this industry had been based for 500 years – the packaging and sale of words and images in the form of printed books – was called into question by a technological revolution that enabled symbolic content to be stored, manipulate...d and transmitted quickly and cheaply. Publishers and retailers found themselves facing a proliferation of new players who were offering new products and services and challenging some of their most deeply held principles and beliefs. The old industry was suddenly thrust into the limelight as bitter conflicts erupted between publishers and new entrants, including powerful new tech giants who saw the world in very different ways. The book wars had begun. While ebooks were at the heart of many of these conflicts, Thompson argues that the most fundamental consequences lie elsewhere. The print-on-paper book has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural form, but the digital revolution has transformed the industry in other ways, spawning new players which now wield unprecedented power and giving rise to an array of new publishing forms. Most important of all, it has transformed the broader information and communication environment, creating new challenges and new opportunities for publishers as they seek to redefine their role in the digital age. This unrivalled account of the book publishing industry as it faces its greatest challenge since Gutenberg will be essential reading for anyone interested in books and their future."--

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Subjects
Publishers and publishing > Technological innovations.
Electronic publishing.
Published
Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
John B. Thompson (author)
Physical Description
xv, 511 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781509546787
  • Preface
  • Introduction
  • 1. The Faltering Rise of the Ebook
  • 2. Re-inventing the Book
  • 3. The Backlist Wars
  • 4. Google Trouble
  • 5. Amazon's Ascent
  • 6. Struggles for Visibility
  • 7. The Self-publishing Explosion
  • 8. Crowdfunding Books
  • 9. Bookflix
  • 10. The New Orality
  • 11. Storytelling in Social Media
  • 12. Old Media, New Media
  • Conclusion: Worlds in Flux
  • Appendix 1. Sales Data from a Large US Trade Publisher
  • Appendix 2. Note on Research Methods
  • Index
Review by Choice Review

This is a fascinating, badly needed study of "what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the greatest technological revolution of our time" (p. vi). Thompson (emer., sociology, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) offers a careful explanation of the rise and plateauing of e-book sales and of crowdfunding, self-publishing, the market disruption and restructuring Amazon imposed, social media as a narrative platform, the entry of tech giants into an age-old field, and the surprising resilience of the traditional monographic print format. Exploring various actors, he helps readers understand what happens and why. Unfortunately, Thompson omits the technological change in prepress, from hot metal typesetting and filmsetting to desktop publishing and disk-to-plate platforms, which was largely complete by the period under examination here (2000 to the late 2010s). There is still plenty to consider. Written by a sociologist, the narrative concentrates on the agency technology gives people to distribute the stories they value. The study focuses on decision-making change within the landscape of US publishing rather than personalities or financing. The individual stories included are synecdochic, resulting in a work that represents forces and results rather than merely institutional history. Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates, faculty, and professionals. --Richard L Saunders, Southern Utah University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Sociologist Thompson (Merchants of Culture) investigates the impact of digital technologies on the publishing industry in this insightful and intelligent history. Asking "what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time," Thompson examines the impact of e-books on the business, concluding that the central tension in modern publishing is "different ways of thinking about content and... generating power." Where publishers have seen books as a profit stream, large tech companies such as Amazon (with its creation of the Kindle) and Google (with its ambitious book scanning project) instead see them as a means to an end, leveraging them to draw in users for the purpose of gaining data that they can monetize in other ways. Thompson also covers such topics as self-publishing (which diminishes publishers' ability to gatekeep), access to capital via crowdfunding, and subscription services as they moved from TV and music into the book world. Thompson knows his material, but the granularity he gets into--the workflow of audiobook narrators, the marketing methods behind sites such as Book Bub--might be more than general readers are interested in. Still, the attention to detail is sure to fascinate bibliophiles and anyone with an interest in the industry. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A multifaceted portrait of the publishing industry and how it has been altered by digital technology. British sociologist Thompson follows his study of trade publishers, Merchants of Culture (2010), with an authoritative examination of the effect of the digital revolution on Anglo-American book publishing. Drawing on nearly 200 interviews with senior publishing executives and other staff, hundreds of interviews he had conducted in researching Merchants, and considerable proprietary data, the author reveals the complexities of a transformation that, he asserts, in still underway. He recounts in detail early efforts to find content for digitalization, such as the Google Library Project, Project Gutenberg, and the HathiTrust Digital Library, which resulted in years of lawsuits by publishers who sought to maintain control over content. Publishers worried, as well, about the e-book, fearing that it would render the print-and-paper book obsolete. The release of Amazon's Kindle in November 2007 seemed threatening, but Thompson discovered that after a surge in popularity, consumer interest in e-books has diminished. Furthermore, some content--e.g., cookbooks and illustrated books--never translated well into digital format. Nevertheless, digitalization has produced a "democratization of culture" that has allowed writers to reach readers without publishing houses as gatekeepers. Self-publishing opportunities and services, crowdfunding from sites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and social media platforms such as Wattpad, where "readers and writers interact around the shared activity of writing and reading stories," have opened up new access points for authors. Publishers have responded by becoming more reader-centric and looking for ways to create a diversified marketplace. Although optimistic about the future of the book, Thompson warns about Amazon's unfettered domination. "Regulatory policies that were devised for an earlier era of capitalism," he writes, "need to be reconsidered in a new era in which the accumulation and control of information have come to form a crucial basis of corporate power." A well-informed analysis of significant cultural change that should interest anyone who works in book publishing. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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