When is a book not a book?

2016/10/14 13:55:04

The e-book has made continued inroads into the publishing world but the printed book has defied predictions of its death. Research by Professor John Thompson focuses on the challenges facing the publishing industry as it embraces the opportunities afforded by the digital revolution.

 


From the University of Cambridge newsletter, Oct 14, 2016:

 

In his book Merchants of Culture, Professor John Thompson recounts a conversation with the head of media asset development at a large US publishing house. The topic is the impact and future of digital publishing.

His interviewee, anonymised as Steve, has come from the music industry, where he has seen the digital revolution disrupting traditional models. Tasked with shaping the future of a leading publishing house, Steve is struggling to convince his colleagues to think differently about books and to embrace the digital revolution. He says: “A book is not a book. Books are categories. Books are types. Books are different styles of things.”

Thompson is interested in the changing structure of the book publishing industry as the digital revolution transforms the processes and products of the publishing business in ways that are both visible and invisible to the consumer. The outcome of his present research will be a book that is due to be published in 2017, in which he will describe the volatile, contested environment responsible for delivering texts to millions of readers in an ever-increasing range of formats.

At the heart of Thompson’s conversation with Steve is a discussion about the thousands of files that are the publisher’s most valuable assets – literally its lifeblood. Having digitised its backlist of top sellers, the company holds an archive of 40,000 titles, a figure that is constantly expanding. How these files are archived, managed and protected so they can be delivered to readers in the most suitable formats is vital to the continuing health of the publishing house. The archiving process has been far from simple, requiring the retrieval of files from printers and opening up heated debates about copyright. And the sheer flexibility offered by digitisation introduces new challenges.

Steve explains that, while paper books are relatively simple to deliver (“you’re delivering tree”), the delivery of digital goods is much more complicated. “The thing that people always hoped was the digital world would get simpler and it’s actually a whole lot more complicated because your end result isn’t the same. The end result is a database, the end result is a PDF, it’s an image-based PDF, it’s an XML file, it’s an ad-based, Google-search-engine toolset – we’re going to have many more properties digitally than we possibly could have physically. We have seven physical properties [for our books]… and online we have hundreds of formats and types and styles.”

Few of these challenges were foreseen in the feverish hype of the 1990s that the days of the book were numbered. Paper texts were clunky and old fashioned; digital versions were smart and sleek.

Many new start-ups were launched, seeking to create new forms of the book that exploited the multimedia potential of new technologies. But, despite the hype, sales of e-books remained sluggish and many start-ups failed.

E-books finally began to take off in autumn 2007 when Amazon launched the Kindle, which allowed readers to download books and other content directly onto their devices. Sales of e-books soared: in 2010 one large publisher saw its e-book sales rise from 12% to 26% of its revenue over Christmas week.

Industry pundits had predicted that e-book sales would be driven by business books and by businessmen, but it didn’t work out like that – far from it. “The real areas of growth were commercial fiction and genre fiction – categories like sci-fi, mysteries and crime, romances and thrillers,” says Thompson. “This was a revolution being driven largely by women reading commercial and genre fiction on their Kindles.”

Much has happened since Thompson’s interview with Steve took place in New York, but Thompson has maintained the many publishing contacts who give him first-hand access to the latest industry developments. He is now mid-way through an ambitious project to revisit publishers on both sides of the Atlantic in order to discover “what is happening while it’s happening” in an industry that suddenly finds itself at the centre of a major disruptive transformation.

From 2008 to 2012, e-books grew from less than 1% of total US trade sales to over 20%; this was phenomenal growth in an industry where overall sales remain largely static. Many people working in the industry worried that publishing would go the same way as the music industry. But then something dramatic happened: the growth slowed and levelled off at around 22%, forming a classic S-curve. “When you dig beneath the surface, however, you see that the simple S-curve is misleading because it conceals a great deal of variation between different kinds of books. In the case of romance fiction, the growth begins to level off at around 60%, whereas many categories of nonfiction plateau at between 15% and 25%,” says Thompson.

 

[…]

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/feature ... a%20book%20not%20a%20book

 

Printer Friendly Page Send this Story to a Friend Create a PDF from the article