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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
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, manipulated 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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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise for
Book Wars
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Introduction
Notes
1 The Faltering Rise of the Ebook
The origins and rise of the ebook
The differentiated pattern of ebook sales: delving beneath the surface
Explaining the variations
Form vs format
Beyond the US
Notes
2 Re-inventing the Book
The life and times of the digital short
A radical experiment
Ebooks as apps
Re-inventing the book as app
False dawn
Notes
3 The Backlist Wars
Opening salvo
Bringing the greats back to life
The limits of backlist-only ebook publishing
Notes
4 Google Trouble
The search engine wars
Settlements come and go
How big is a snippet?
Whither Google Books?
Notes
5 Amazon’s Ascent
The rise of Amazon
The DOJ weighs in
Stand-off with Hachette
Market power
An uneasy truce
Notes
6 Struggles for Visibility
Visibility in the bricks-and-mortar world
The morphing of mediated visibility
The triumph of the algorithm
Reaching out to readers
Literature’s Switzerland
Visibility through discounting
Visibility in a digital age
Notes
7 The Self-publishing Explosion
From vanity to indie publishing
Self-publishing in the ebook age
A beautiful book of your own
Amazon enters the self-publishing field
A spectrum of publishing services
The hidden continent
Estimating the indies
Parallel universes, multiple pathways
Notes
8 Crowdfunding Books
The rise of crowdfunding
Crowdfunding as direct-to-consumer publishing
Reader curation
The pull of the mainstream
Notes
9 Bookflix
Scribd’s wager
The rise and fall of Oyster
Kindle Unlimited enters the scene
Subscription in the ecosystem of books
Notes
10 The New Orality
The development of audiobooks
The rise of Audible
Audiobooks become routine
The audiobook supply chain
Producing audiobooks
Performing the page
Books in the audio-visual mix
Notes
11 Storytelling in Social Media
Building YouTube for stories
Sharing stories for free
From stories to studios
From stories to books
Notes
12 Old Media, New Media
Digital disruption in the creative industries
Data power
Nurturing content, colonizing culture
Publishing in the digital age
Taking readers seriously
Books in the digital age
Notes
Conclusion: Worlds in Flux
Appendix 1: Sales Data from a Large US Trade Publisher
Appendix 2: Note on Research Methods
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 US ebook revenue for trade books, $ millions, 2008–2012
Table 1.2 Ebook sales as a percentage of total revenues of major US trade publishers, 2006...
Table 1.3 US ebook revenue for trade books and rate of growth of ebook sales, 2008–...
Table 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales
Table 1.5 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
Table 1.6 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by broad category at Olympic, units and do...
Table 1.7 Sales in percentages by format, units and dollars at Olympic, 2006–2016
Table 1.8 UK ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2018
Table 1.9 UK ebook sales by category, 2008–2018
Table 1.10 Estimated ebook share of total trade revenue in selected European markets, 2016
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Forms of visibility
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 ISBN output for US self-publishing platforms, 2010–2018: print books
Table 7.2 ISBN output for US self-publishing platforms, 2010–2018: ebooks
Table 7.3 ISBN output for US self-publishing platforms, 2010–2018: ebooks and print...
Chapter 10
Table 10.1 Audiobook title output
Table 10.2 Estimated consumer spending on audiobooks in US, 2003–2017 ($ mill...
Table 10.3 Audiobook formats as percentage of total sales, 2003–2017
Chapter 12
Table 12.1 Total sales, operating profit and margin for Simon & Schuster, 2008–2...
Appendix 1
Table A.1 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net dollars
Table A.2 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net units
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1 US recorded music revenues by format, 1998–2010
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 US ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2012
Figure 1.2 Ebook sales as a percentage of total revenues of major US trade publishers, 2006...
Figure 1.3 US ebook revenue for trade books and rate of growth of ebook sales, 2008–...
Figure 1.4 Print books and ebooks as percentages of total US trade sales
Figure 1.5 Ebooks as percentage of total US trade sales, 2008–2018
Figure 1.6a Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
Figure 1.6b Ebooks as a percentage of total sales at Olympic, units and dollars
Figure 1.7 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by broad category at Olympic, units and do...
Figure 1.8 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net dollars
Figure 1.9 Ebooks as a percentage of total sales by subject at Olympic, net units
Figure 1.10 The ebook uptake model
Figure 1.11a Sales in percentages by format and units at Olympic, 2006–2016
Figure 1.11b Sales in percentages by format and dollars at Olympic, 2006–2016
Figure 1.12a UK ebook revenue for trade books, 2008–2018
Figure 1.12b Ebook revenue as a percentage of total trade sales in the UK
Figure 1.12c Ebook revenue and rate of growth of ebook sales in the UK
Figure 1.13 UK ebook sales as a percentage of total sales by category, 2008–2018
Figure 1.14 Ebooks as a percentage of total trade sales in Germany, 2010–2016
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Some experimental forms of the book
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Google Library Project litigation
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Estimated market shares of US retailers of paid ebook unit sales, 2016
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Building a consumer database
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 The spectrum of publishing services (1)
Figure 7.2 The spectrum of publishing services (2)
Figure 7.3 The new ecology of publishing services
Figure 7.4 Breakdown by category of top 200 bestsellers at Smashwords
Figure 7.5 Sales distribution curve for top 500 bestsellers at Smashwords, 1 May 2012...
Figure 7.6 Number of titles in Amazon’s ebook besteller lists*
Figure 7.7 Daily unit sales of ebook bestsellers
Figure 7.8 Daily gross Amazon $ sales of ebook bestsellers
Figure 7.9 Daily $ revenue to authors from ebook bestellers
Figure 7.10 Market share of ebook unit sales by publisher type, 2014–2016
Figure 7.11 Market share of ebook gross $ sales by publisher type, 2014–2016
Figure 7.12 Market share of ebook $ author earnings by publisher type, 2014–20...
Figure 7.13 Daily gross Amazon $ sales of ebook bestsellers by category, January 2016...
Figure 7.14 Daily gross Amazon $ sales of ebook bestsellers by category, January 2016...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Unbound: growth in money pledged, 2011–2017 (black line is cumulative rev...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 KU Global Fund
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Audiobook titles published in US, 2004–2017
Figure 10.2 Estimated consumer spending on audiobooks in US, 2003–2017
Figure 10.3 Change in US publisher revenues by format, 2012 to 2016
Figure 10.4 Audiobook formats, 2003–2017
Figure 10.5 The audiobook supply chain
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 US trade publishing revenues, 2008–2015
Figure 12.2 US publishing industry revenues, 2008–2015
Figure 12.3 Total sales, operating profit and margin for Simon & Schuster, 2008–2...
Figure 12.4 Key functions of the publisher
Figure 12.5 Book supply chain for mainstream publishers
Figure 12.6 Self-publishing book supply chain
Figure 12.7 Book supply chain for crowdfunded publishing
Figure 12.8 Book supply for Wattpad Books
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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Praise for Book Wars
‘Book Wars is as comprehensive, wide-ranging and deeply considered appraisal of the book publishing world as one can imagine – and a sober consideration of what the digital age has meant to a print-centred business. This masterful work should be the foundation for all future thinking about book publishing and much future thinking about how new technologies change, and don’t change, societies.’
Michael Schudson, Columbia University
‘Thompson weaves together a remarkable account of how and why one of the oldest forms of media has persisted through the challenges posed by digital disruption. Extraordinary in its breadth and depth, Book Wars unpacks the complex implications of digital production and distribution and draws crucial lessons that are relevant well beyond the world of books, providing a valuable lens for examining the profound changes that internet communication has brought to nearly every sector of the economy, and especially media industries.’
Amanda Lotz, Queensland University of Technology
‘John Thompson was there when the digital-driven changes were in full swing, and he uses his bird’s eye view and thoroughly researched analysis to give the reader the story behind the stories. And it’s a great read too.’
John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan Publishers USA
‘An astute deep dive into the current publishing predicament – how we got here and what lies ahead. For anyone who wants to understand the key challenges facing our industry today, this book is highly instructive.’
Jonathan Galassi, President, Farrar Straus & Giroux
‘excellent… Every skirmish, every battle, every standoff is covered objectively with supporting data and entertainingly with the case studies I would have chosen.’
Richard Charkin, Publishing Perspectives
‘John B. Thompson’s Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing is certain to become this year’s must-read for anyone serious about the publishing industry.’
Thad McIlroy, The Future of Publishing
‘Thompson’s Book Wars has been the book-about-book-publishing event of 2021…no one else has Thompson’s ability to marshal the facts into comprehensive and illuminating accounts of publishing in all its splendor.’
Publishers Weekly
‘Nobody arrives better equipped than Thompson to map how the publishing ecosystem has persisted and morphed in the digital environment… it’s invaluable to have such thorough documentation of the digital publishing multiverse.’
The Los Angeles Review of Books
'Exceptionally well written, organized and presented... Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing is an extraordinary study and one that is especially and unreservedly recommended for anyone with an interest in how and why the publishing industry works as it does today.'
Midwest Book Review
‘Thompson takes the reader on a wild and exciting ride exploring the changes that have turned book publishing on its head over the last 30 years, with the development of many new technologies that readers may have come to take for granted or never considered… well worth reading to understand where the book was in the latter part of the twentieth century and where it is headed well into the twenty-first.’
LSE Review of Books
‘A great book… This is a comprehensive and thoroughly convincing monograph on the digital revolution in publishing. There is just no way round this book, for publishing studies scholars (and students) as well as for book business professionals interested in the inner workings of the digital sector of their industry.’
Logos
‘Thompson’s work is authoritative and will be of tremendous value to future readers and researchers in understanding how a 500-year-old culture of print was able to absorb and adapt. I’m aware of no other title that provides such a useful account of how publishing professionals have fought to ensure stabilization and reliable delivery of content.’
The Scholarly Kitchen
‘timely and magisterial… Thompson has provided an invaluable reference and resource for researchers into the complex and rapidly changing field of book publishing. Elegantly written, thoroughly researched, and remarkably comprehensive, Book Wars tells a fascinating story of how publishers large and small are adapting to the transformational effects of the digital revolution.’
Publishing Research Quarterly
‘Thompson is an eloquent and lucid writer who has a real talent for telescoping smoothly from individual cases to a bird’s-eye view of the industry of trade publishing… I do not imagine there are many other scholars working today who could provide such a magisterial account of the past two decades of the digital revolution in Anglo-American trade book publishing.’
Journal of Scholarly Publishing
‘Book Wars brings depth and empirical richness to its account of the rapidly changing publishing industry, while contributing to theoretical and conceptual debates about digital platforms and culture industries.’
International Journal of Communication
‘Book Wars presents a comprehensive and compelling narrative of new forms of book production, publication, and dissemination. Anyone considering the current and historical states of Anglo-American trade publishing would benefit from reading this impressive piece of scholarship.’
Information & Culture
‘fascinating… If you love books, and are intrigued by the plethora of options now available to you as both a reader and writer, you’ll like this book.’
ICT & Computing in Education
‘authoritative and scholarly’
The Critic
‘a brilliant and singular work’
Escola de Llibreria
‘Literary scholars, professionals with a vested interest in books’ value, stand to benefit enormously from Thompson’s account… Book Wars shows that understanding the major forces shaping literary production and circulation requires methods appropriate to resolutely non-textual phenomena. Our disciplinary habitus may not be a reliable guide to the hidden continents of literary media. Thompson’s map of the changing publishing field points to different lines of inquiry for contemporary literary studies—different objects, different questions—than the ones we have so far taken up.’
Contemporary Literature
‘an extremely authoritative account of the revolution which at one time looked like it was going to destroy the fusty old world of book publishing, but has actually ended up reinvigorating it in ways that no one predicted… for anybody wanting to get into publishing this should be compulsory reading. If you are about to go for a job interview anywhere in the industry, read this book first!’
Authors Electric
Book Wars
The Digital Revolution in Publishing
John B. Thompson
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © John B. Thompson 2021
The right of John B. Thompson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
This paperback edition published in 2022 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4678-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5493-5 (pb)
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The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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PREFACE
During the last few decades, we have been living through a technological revolution that is as radical and far-reaching as any that came before in the long history of the human species. Among other things, this new revolution is transforming our information and communication environment and disrupting many of the industries that played a central role in shaping this environment for most of the twentieth century and before. The traditional media industries – newspapers, radio, television, music, cinema – have all been hurled into a whirlpool of change as old analogue technologies were pushed aside by new technologies based on the digital codification and transmission of symbolic content. Many of the media institutions that were key players in the analogue age have found themselves threatened by the digital transition, their revenues collapsing and their once-dominant positions undermined, while powerful new players have emerged and begun to reshape the contours of our information space. Today we live in a world which, in terms of the forms and channels of information and communication, is fundamentally different from the world that existed just half a century ago.
The book publishing industry is no exception – it too has been caught up in the turmoil brought about by the digital revolution. And, in some ways, there is more at stake here than with other media industries: not only is the book publishing industry the oldest of the media industries, it is also an industry that has played a pivotal role in the shaping of modern culture, from the scientific revolution in early modern Europe to the profusion of literatures and forms of knowledge that have become such an important part of our lives and societies today. So what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time? What happens when a media industry that has been with us for more than 500 years and is deeply embedded in our history and culture finds itself confronted by, and threatened by, a new set of technologies that are radically different from those that have underpinned its practices and business models for centuries? If you were working in the book publishing industry during the first decade of the twenty-first century, you wouldn’t have had to look far to find reasons to feel anxious about your future: the music industry was in freefall, the newspaper industry was experiencing a sharp decline in revenue and some of the big tech companies were becoming seriously interested in the digitization of books. Why wouldn’t the book industry be swept up in the maelstrom unleashed by the digital revolution? No hard-headed manager or disinterested analyst would have been sanguine about the chances of the book publishing industry surviving its encounter with the digital revolution unscathed.
But what form would the digital disruption of the book publishing industry assume, exactly? Would the industry undergo a root-and-branch transformation like the music industry, where physical formats morphed into digital downloads and the major record labels that had controlled the production and distribution of music experienced a dramatic collapse in revenues? Would ebooks take off and become the new medium of choice for readers, consigning the print-on-paper book to the dustbin of history? Would bookshops disappear and publishers be disintermediated by a technological revolution that would enable readers and writers to communicate directly via the internet, unhindered by the traditional gatekeepers of the book publishing industry? In the early 2000s, all of these possibilities – and more – were being seriously contemplated, both by senior managers within the industry and by the many commentators and consultants who were happy to offer their views on the future of an industry that seemed to be on the cusp of disruption.
As the years went by, this remarkable encounter between the oldest of our media industries and the great technological revolution of our time gradually took shape, producing outcomes that very few commentators had anticipated. It is not simply that the commentators were wrong – though, in many cases, they were, and wildly so. It is that their ways of thinking about what happens when technologies disrupt established industries were based far too much on the analysis of the technologies themselves and on a belief – usually implicit, rarely examined – that new technologies, by virtue of their intrinsic and advantageous features, would prevail eventually. What seldom featured in these accounts was any real awareness of how the development of new technologies, and their adoption or non-adoption as the case may be, are always embedded in an array of pre-existing social institutions, practices and preferences, and are always part of a dynamic social process in which individuals and organizations are pursuing their own interests and aims, seeking to improve their own positions and out-manoeuvre others in a competitive, and at times ruthless, struggle. In short, what most commentators lacked was any real understanding of the forces that were shaping the particular social space or ‘field’ within which these technologies were being developed and deployed. They focused on the technologies themselves, as if technologies were a deus ex machina that would sweep all before it, without taking account of the complex social processes in which these technologies were embedded and of which they were part. Of course, this abstraction from social processes made the commentators’ task a whole lot easier: the social world is a messy place and it’s much easier to predict the future if you ignore the messiness of the present. But it doesn’t make your predictions more accurate, and you don’t improve our understanding of technological change by discounting the social, economic and political factors that shape the contexts within which technologies exist.
This book is based on the assumption that we can understand the impact of the digital revolution on an industry like book publishing – and indeed any industry, media or otherwise – only by immersing ourselves in the messiness of the social world and understanding how technologies are developed and deployed, how they are taken up or passed over, by individuals and organizations who are situated in certain contexts, guided by certain preferences and pursuing certain ends. Technologies never produce effects ex nihilo, but always in relation to the individuals and organizations who decide to invest time and energy and resources in them as a way of pursuing their interests and aims (whatever they might be). The messiness of the social world is not a distraction from technology’s path but is the path itself, for it is the interaction between the affordances of new technologies – that is, what these technologies enable or make possible – and the messiness of the social world that determines what impact new technologies will have and the extent to which, if at all, they will disrupt existing institutions and practices.
My immersion in the messy world of the publishing industry began two decades ago, when I set out to study the structure and transformation of the modern book publishing industry. I spent five years studying the world of academic publishing in the US and the UK, followed by another five years of deep immersion in the world of Anglo-American trade publishing, and I wrote two books about these worlds, Books in the Digital Age (about academic publishing) and Merchants of Culture (about trade publishing). In both of these books, I devoted a lot of attention to the impact of the digital revolution on these two very different sectors of the book publishing industry – this was a key issue in both sectors of this industry from the mid-1990s on, so no serious study of the publishing industry at this time could ignore it. But understanding the impact of the digital revolution was not my sole or even my primary concern in these earlier studies: my primary concern was to understand the key structural characteristics of these sectors – or ‘fields’ as I called them – and to analyse the dynamics that shaped the evolution of these fields over time. When the digital revolution began to make its presence felt in the world of book publishing, it did so by building upon, and in some cases disrupting, a set of institutions, practices and social relations that already existed and were structured in certain ways. Digital technologies and innovations enabled established organizations to do old things in new ways and to do some new things – to improve the efficiency of their organizations; offer better services to authors, readers and clients; repackage their content; develop new products; and, in a myriad of different ways, develop and strengthen their position in the field. But they also enabled new players to enter the field and challenge incumbent stakeholders by offering new products and services. The proliferation of new players and possibilities created a mixture of excitement, alarm and trepidation in the field and generated a profusion of new initiatives, developments and conflicts, as new entrants sought to gain a foothold in a field that had been dominated hitherto by the established players of the publishing industry. Of course, there was nothing new about conflict and change in the publishing industry – the industry had experienced many periods of turbulence and upheaval in the past. But the turbulence generated by the unfolding of the digital revolution in publishing was unprecedented, both in terms of its specific characteristics and in terms of the scale of the challenges it posed. Suddenly, the very foundations of an industry that had existed for more than 500 years were being called into question as never before. The old industry of book publishing was thrust into the limelight as bitter conflicts erupted between publishers and new entrants, including powerful new tech companies who saw the world in very different ways. Skirmishes turned into battles that were fought out in full public view, in some cases ending up in the courts. The book wars had begun.
Books are part of culture and book wars could be seen as culture wars, but they are not the kind of culture war that is normally referred to by this term. The term ‘culture war’ is commonly used to refer to social and political conflicts based on diverging and deeply held values and beliefs, such as those concerning abortion, affirmative action, sexual orientation, religion, morality and family life. These are conflicts rooted in values and value systems to which many people are deeply attached. They tap into identities as well as interests, into different senses of who we are as individuals and collectivities and of what does and should matter to us – hence the passion with which these culture wars have so often been fought in the public domain. The book wars are a very different kind of conflict. They don’t arouse the passions as the culture wars do, no one has marched in the streets or burned books in protest. By the standards of the culture wars, the book wars are distinctly low-key. Indeed, ‘book wars’ might seem like a rather dramatic term for a state of affairs that involves no overt displays of violence, no demonstrations and no shouting in the streets. But the absence of overt displays of violence should not mislead us into thinking that the conflicts are not real or that they don’t really matter. On the contrary, the struggles that have broken out over the last couple of decades in the normally placid world of publishing are very real; they have been fought with a determination and conviction that attests to the fact that, for those involved, these are hugely important struggles that touch on vital interests and in which matters of principle are at stake. At the same time, they are symptoms of the fact that the book industry is undergoing a profound transformation which is disrupting the field, calling into question accepted ways of doing things and thrusting established players into conflict both with new entrants and with old hands who have spotted new opportunities opened up by technological change and seized them, sometimes at the expense of others.
My aim in this book is to examine what actually happened, and what continues to happen, when the digital revolution takes hold in the world of book publishing. Not surprisingly, this is a complicated story with many different players and developments, as established organizations sought to defend and advance their positions while many new players sought to enter the field, or to experiment with new ways of creating and disseminating what we have come to think of as ‘the book’. Given that the world of book publishing is itself immensely complex, consisting of many different worlds with their own players and practices, I have not tried to be comprehensive: I have reduced the complexity and narrowed the scope by focusing on the world of Anglo-American trade publishing – the same world that was the focus of Merchants of Culture. By ‘trade publishing’, I mean that sector of the industry that publishes books, both fiction and nonfiction, that are aimed at general readers and sold through bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other retail outlets, including online booksellers like Amazon. By ‘Anglo-American’ trade publishing, I mean English-language trade publishing that is based in the US and the UK, and for various historical reasons the publishing industries based in the US and the UK have long had a dominant role in the international field of English-language trade publishing. To understand the impact of the digital revolution on other sectors of publishing, such as academic publishing or reference publishing, or on publishing industries operating in other languages and other countries, would require different studies, as the processes and players would not be the same. While my focus here is on the world of Anglo-American trade publishing, I have not restricted myself to the traditional players in this field. The traditional players are important – no question about it. But a key part of the disruption caused by the digital revolution is that it is a shake-up that opens the door for other players to enter the field. These include some of the large tech companies with their own agendas and their own battles to fight, equipped with resources on a scale that dwarfs even the largest of the traditional publishers. But they also include a myriad of small players and enterprising individuals who are located on the margins of the field or in separate spaces altogether, in some cases impinging directly on the publishing field and in other cases subsisting in a parallel universe that connects only indirectly, if at all, with what we might think of as the world of the book.
While some of these new players and their initiatives gain real traction and develop into substantial undertakings, others fizzle out and die – the history of technology is littered with inventions that fail. But when historians come to write the history of technologies and of the companies that develop them, they tend to focus on the successful ones, on the technologies and organizations that, in some sense or some respect, change the world. We read history backwards through the lens of the inventions and companies that succeed. We are fascinated by the Googles and Apples and Facebooks and Amazons of this world – those exceptional ‘unicorns’ that have become so large so quickly that they have assumed an almost mythical status. What gets filtered out of this process are all of those inventions, initiatives and new ideas that seemed like good ideas at the time, maybe even great ideas in which some people passionately believed, but that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it – all those small histories of the great ideas that failed. Maybe the time wasn’t right, maybe the money ran out, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all – whatever the reason, the vast majority of new ventures fail. But the history of the new ventures that failed is often just as revealing as the history of those that succeeded. The failures and false starts tell us a lot about the conditions of success precisely because they underscore what happens when those conditions, or some of those conditions, are absent. And if the vast majority of new ventures end in failure, then an account that focused only on the successes would be very partial at best. Writing the history of technologies by focusing only on the successes would be as one-sided and misleading as writing the history of wars from the perspective of the victors.
Of course, it would be much easier to write the history of the digital revolution in publishing if we had all the advantages of hindsight, if we could transport ourselves forward to the year 2030 or 2040 or 2050, look back at the publishing industry and ask ourselves how it had been changed by the digital revolution. We would have lots of historical data to scrutinize and some of the people who had lived through the transformation would still be around to talk about it. It is much more difficult to write this history when you’re in the middle of it. What can you say about a technological revolution that is still so young, still just beginning to disrupt the traditional practices of an old and well-established industry when, undoubtedly, there is still so much more to come? How can you speak and write with any confidence about a world that is still in the throes of change, where so much is still unsettled and where everyone in the industry is still struggling to make sense of what is happening around them? How, in other words, do you recount a revolution in medias res?
To this question, there is no easy answer, and any account we give will have to be hedged with conditions and qualifications. But at least it is easier to try to give an account of this kind from the vantage point of 2020 than it would have been in 2010 or 2012 or 2015. By 2020, we have had more than a decade of serious ebook sales, so the patterns have had longer to establish themselves and will have achieved a degree of clarity they didn’t have when ebooks were just beginning to take off. Some of the early experiments and more radical projects in digital publishing will have been tried and tested, some will have succeeded and many will have failed, and both the successes and the failures will tell us something about what is viable in this domain and what is not. Moreover, after ten years, the novelty factor will have worn off to some extent and early developments that may have been affected by the attractions of the new may have given way to patterns that reflect more enduring preferences and tastes. All of these are reasons (albeit small) to think that, while a time machine would have made our task much easier, it may not be impossible to say something worthwhile about a transformation that is still under way.
Not only is it difficult to discern what is most important when writing about a process that is still under way, it is also impossible to provide an account that is fully up to date. What I have tried to provide here is not so much a snapshot in time but rather a dynamic portrait of a field in motion, as individuals and organizations within the field struggle to make sense of, adapt to and take advantage of the changes that are taking place around them. To do this properly, you have to home in on some of these individuals and organizations and follow them as they seek to forge a path in the midst of uncertainty, reconstruct the options they faced, the choices they made and the developments that affected them at different points in time. But you can only follow them so far: at some point the story must be cut off and drawn to a close. History is frozen in the act of writing it, and the account you offer will always necessarily refer to a time that precedes the moment when your account is read. As soon as you finish a text, the world moves on and the portrait you have painted is outdated: instant obsolescence is the fate that awaits every chronicler of the present. There is no alternative but to embrace this fate and hope that readers will have a capacious understanding of timeliness.
Most of the research on which this book is based took place between 2013 and 2019, during which time I did more than 180 interviews with senior executives and other staff in a variety of organizations in the US and the UK, mainly in New York, London and Silicon Valley – organizations ranging from the large trade publishers to numerous start-ups, self-publishing organizations and innovative publishing ventures. (A detailed account of my research methods and sources can be found in appendix 2.) When it was helpful and relevant to do so, I also drew on some of the 280 interviews that I had conducted previously for Merchants of Culture. I am very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, which funded the research from 2013 to 2019 (Grant 11300709) and enabled me to spend extended periods of time in the field, and grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, which funded the earlier research (RES-000-22-1292). I am also very grateful to the many organizations which opened their doors to me, gave me access to their staff and, in some cases, their data; most sources of data are acknowledged in the text, although there are instances where data were provided on condition that the source remains anonymous and, where this is the case, I have scrupulously honoured this commitment. Above all, I am deeply grateful to the many individuals who gave very generously of their time, allowing me to interview them, sometimes repeatedly over several years: I simply could not have written this book without their help. I have quoted directly from only a small proportion of these interviews, and only a fraction of the organizations I studied are used as case studies in the book, but every interview was invaluable in terms of deepening my understanding of a world in flux and the many players who are active, or were active, in it. Most of the individuals I interviewed remain anonymous and I often use pseudonyms when referring both to individuals and to companies. But there are occasions when the real names of interviewees and their companies are used, always with their consent, simply because their stories are so unique that it would be impossible to write about them with any degree of rigour and preserve anonymity. When the real name of an individual is used, the full name is given – first name plus surname – on the first occasion of use. When I use a pseudonym, by contrast, I use an invented first name only – Tom, Sarah, etc. – on the first and subsequent occasions. When I use a pseudonym for a company, I put the pseudonym in inverted commas on the first occasion of use – ‘Everest’, ‘Olympic’, etc. (Again, these conventions and the rationale are explained more fully in appendix 2.)
On those occasions where I quoted from interviews with individuals who are given their real names in the text, I subsequently wrote to these individuals, sent them the text I had written about them and/or their organization, and gave them the opportunity to comment on it: many did so, sometimes in considerable detail, and I took account of their comments in the final version of the text. I am very grateful to these individuals for their willingness to read these texts and provide me with feedback. I am also very grateful to Michael Cader, Angus Phillips and Michael Schudson who read the entire text, and to Jane Friedman and Michele Cobb who read the chapters dealing with their areas of expertise (self-publishing and audiobooks, respectively): they provided me with many helpful comments and suggestions and saved me from numerous errors and oversights. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own. I am grateful to Leigh Mueller for her meticulous copyediting and to the many people at Polity – including Neil de Cort, Rachel Moore, Evie Deavall, Julia Davies, Clare Ansell, Sue Pope, Sarah Dobson, Breffni O’Connor, Adrienn Jelinek, Clara Ross, Madeline Sharaga, Emma Longstaff, Lydia Davis and Lucas Jones – who steered this book through the publication process. My thanks, finally, to Mirca and Alex, who displayed uncommon patience and understanding over the years when this book was in gestation and who endured a very cold winter in New York while some of the research was being done: this book is for them, small recompense for the many sacrifices they made while it was being written.
J. B. T., Cambridge
INTRODUCTION
Andy Weir couldn’t believe his luck. He always wanted to be a writer and he started writing fanfiction when he was 9. But, being a sensible young man, he doubted he could make a living as a writer, so he trained to be a software engineer and became a computer programmer instead. As a resident of Silicon Valley, this turned out to be a wise decision, and he had a successful career as a programmer for twenty-five years. But he never gave up his dream of being a writer and he continued to write stories in his spare time. He even had a go in the late 1980s at writing a book and trying to get it published, but no one was interested: ‘It was the standard struggling author’s story, couldn’t get any interest – publishers weren’t interested, no agent wanted to represent me, it just wasn’t meant to be.’ Undeterred, Andy continued to write in his spare time – writing was his hobby. As the internet became more prevalent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he set up a website and began posting his stories online. He had a mailing list that people could sign up to, and he sent them an email whenever he posted a new story. Over a period of ten years, he gradually built up a list of some 3,000 email addresses. Then he started writing serial fiction, posting a chapter at a time on his website and letting his readers know. One of these stories was about a manned space mission to Mars. Being a software engineer, Andy was interested in problem-solving, and he began to think, ‘OK, what if something goes wrong, how do we make sure the crew survives? What if two things go wrong, what do we do then? And suddenly I realized I had a story.’ He wrote in the evenings and at weekends, whenever he had spare time and felt the urge, and when he finished a chapter he posted it on his website. His readers became very engaged in the story and picked him up on some of the technical details about the physics or the chemistry or the maths of a manned mission to Mars, and he would go back and fix it. This active engagement with his readers spurred him on. Chapter by chapter, the story unfolded of an unfortunate astronaut, Mark Watney, who had been knocked unconscious by a violent dust storm shortly after arriving on Mars and woke up to discover that his crewmates had taken him for dead and made an emergency escape without him, leaving Mark alone to survive indefinitely on a remote planet with limited supplies of food and water and no way to communicate with Earth.
After the last chapter of The Martian had been posted on his website, Andy was ready to move on to another project, but he started getting emails from some of his readers saying, ‘Hey, I really love The Martian but I hate reading it in a web browser. Can you make an e-reader version?’ So Andy figured out how to do that – it wasn’t too hard for a software engineer – and he posted an ePub and a Mobi file on his website so that people could download it for free. Then he started getting emails from people saying, ‘Thanks, I really appreciate that you put up e-reader formats, but I’m not very technically savvy and I don’t know how to download a file from the internet and put it on my e-reader. Can you just put it up as a Kindle?’ So Andy did that too – filled in the form on Amazon, uploaded the file and, presto, there it was on the Amazon site, now available as a Kindle ebook. Andy wanted to give it away for free but Amazon require you to put a price on your ebook, so he chose the lowest price that Amazon allowed, 99¢. He sent an email out to his readers and said, ‘There you are everybody, you can read it for free on my website, you can download the free ePub or Mobi version from my website or you can pay Amazon a buck to put it on your Kindle for you’, and to his surprise more people bought it from Amazon than downloaded it for free. The ebook swiftly moved up Amazon’s bestseller list, reaching number one in the sci-fi category and staying there for quite some time. Pretty soon the book was selling about 300 copies a day, but, having never published a book before, Andy had no idea whether this was good, bad or indifferent. He was just pleased that it was getting good customer reviews and lingering in the number one spot for sci-fi on Kindle.
Then something happened that he never expected. One day he got an email from an agent who said, ‘I think we could get your book into print and if you don’t have an agent, I’d like to represent you.’ Andy couldn’t believe it. Some years earlier, he had written to agents all over the country, begging them to represent him, and no one wanted to know. Now he gets an email out of the blue from an agent who is offering to represent him, and he didn’t even have to ask. ‘I’m like, wow.’
What Andy didn’t know at the time is that, 3,000 miles away in New York, a science-fiction editor at Crown, an imprint of Random House, had been browsing around some of his favourite internet sci-fi sites, as he did from time to time when things were a little slow, and he had come across several mentions of The Martian, so he decided to check it out. He noticed it was number one on the Kindle sci-fi bestseller list and it had lots of good customer reviews, so he bought a copy, dipped into it and liked what he read, though he wasn’t sure what to make of all the hard science. He had a phone call lined up with an agent friend of his and, in the course of the conversation, he mentioned the book to him, told him he’d been tracking it on Amazon and suggested he take a look and let him know what he thought. He did, loved it (‘I was just blown away by it’ – the hard science appealed to his geeky nature), got in touch with Andy and signed him up. This was an agent who was accustomed to finding new authors online, sometimes by reading an interesting article on the internet and getting in touch with the author, sometimes by coming across a self-published book on Amazon that looked interesting, so he knew how to navigate this terrain. Out of courtesy to the editor who had called this book to his attention, the agent got back in touch with him and gave him a little time to consider it as an exclusive. The editor sent it around to a few of his colleagues at Crown and asked them to look at it over the weekend; they liked it too, and on Monday they made a generous offer to pre-empt the book and take it off the table. Andy was thrilled and the deal was done. ‘It was a no-brainer’, said Andy; ‘it was more money than I make in a year in my current job, and that was just the advance.’
At around the same time, a small film production company had also spotted The Martian on the Kindle bestseller list and got in touch with Andy, who put them in touch with his new agent. The agent contacted his film co-agent and they used the interest of the small production company to pique the interest of Fox, who snapped up the film rights and announced that the movie would be directed by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon in the lead. With publishing rights now sold to Random House and a Hollywood blockbuster in the works, the scouts began to work their magic with foreign publishers. The buzz machine was spinning and it ramped up quickly. Before long, rights were sold in thirty-one international territories and Andy’s substantial advance was earned out before the book was even published.
To Andy, who was oblivious to these distant conversations, the sudden interest in his book seemed somewhat unreal. He was at work the week that the deals with Random House and Fox were done, in his programming cubicle as usual, and he had to go to a conference room to take a call about the movie deal. ‘It’s like, hey, out of nowhere, all of your dreams are going to come true. It was so unbelievable that I literally didn’t believe it. I hadn’t actually met any of these people, it was all just emails and phone calls, and in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “This might just be a scam.”’ It only hit home when the contract finally arrived and the return address was Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY, and then the cheque for the advance arrived. ‘I thought, “If this is a scam, they’re very bad at it.”’
Once the deal with Random House was done, Andy was asked to take down the Kindle edition, which he did. The text was lightly edited and then sent out to various prominent authors for pre-publication blurbs – the responses were amazing. An array of well-known sci-fi authors raved about this new addition to their genre. All of this helped the editor to get people talking about the book, generate excitement inside the house and encourage the sales reps to get behind the book and push it when they met with the buyers at the major retail outlets – critical factors in the attempt to make a book stand out from the thousands of new titles that are published every week. The Random House edition of The Martian was eventually published as a hardcover and ebook in February 2014 and went straight onto the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for six weeks. A glowing review in the Wall Street Journal described it as ‘utterly compelling … This is techno sci-fi at a level even Arthur Clarke never achieved.’ The paperback edition was released in October 2014 and again went quickly onto the New York Times bestseller list, reaching the number one spot and remaining on the list well into 2015.
There was something remarkable and unprecedented about Andy’s success: through a series of metamorphoses, a text that started life as a blog on someone’s personal website ended up as an international bestseller and a blockbuster film and, with it, a life and a career were transformed. A generation earlier, none of this would have been possible and a talent like Andy’s might well have gone undiscovered. That was one of the many upsides of the digital revolution in publishing: thanks to the internet, talent could be discovered in new ways and a writer who had been beavering away in relative obscurity could suddenly be catapulted into international stardom. Everyone gains – writer, publisher, millions of readers all over the world. But, remarkable though Andy’s success was, this was only one side of the story. The very changes that had enabled Andy to realize his childhood dream were wreaking havoc in an industry that had operated in pretty much the same way for as long as anyone could remember. The industry by which Andy was so pleased to be embraced had, largely unbeknown to Andy, become a battleground where powerful new players were disrupting traditional practices and challenging accepted ways of doing things, all facilitated by a technological revolution that was as profound as anything the industry had experienced in the five centuries since Gutenberg. The astonishing success of The Martian – from blog to bestseller – epitomizes the paradox of the digital revolution in publishing: unprecedented new opportunities are opened up, both for individuals and for organizations, while beneath the surface the tectonic plates of the industry are shifting. Understanding how these two movements can happen simultaneously, and why they take the form that they do, is the key to understanding the digital revolution in publishing.
The digital revolution first began to make itself felt in the book publishing industry in the 1980s. At this time, the world of Anglo-American trade publishing was dominated by three sets of players that had become increasingly powerful in the period since the 1960s: the retail chains, the literary agents and the publishing corporations.1
