Book wars The digital revolution in publishing

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.

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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)

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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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