BOOK WARS

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.