Book Wars

The Digital Revolution in Publishing

John B. Thompson

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509546794
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Chapter 1

THE FALTERING RISE OF THE EBOOK

Any attempt to recount the history of ebooks presupposes some understanding of what an ebook is. As noted earlier, our understanding of what constitutes a book has been shaped for centuries by the particular form that the book has assumed since Gutenberg – ink printed on sheets of paper that are bound together (glued, sometimes also sewn) along one edge, so that they can be read sequentially and turned over one page at a time, similar to the traditional codex but transformed by the use of paper, ink and the printing press. This form places certain limits on what can and cannot be treated as a book. It would be hard to treat a 20-word text as a book, for instance, as there simply wouldn’t be enough text to fill more than a page (unless this were a very unusual design with 1 or 2 words on a page). Similarly, the text cannot go on indefinitely, or even into millions of words, and still be produced as ‘a book’ in any straightforward sense (though it could be produced as a series of books). In other words, the welding together of content and form in the traditional print-on-paper book places certain contingent limits on what can and cannot be treated as a book. But separate the content from the form and suddenly it is no longer so clear what exactly a book is. Could a 20-word text be a book if there were no pages to turn and the text told a story from beginning to end with splendid conciseness? For the purposes of gathering statistics on book production by country, UNESCO famously defined a book as ‘a non-periodic publication of at least 49 pages exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the public’.¹ It is understandable that UNESCO wanted to come up with a clear criterion that would enable it to gather cross-national statistics on a comparable basis, but as a way of conceptualizing the book this is clearly an arbitrary number. Why 49 pages? Why not 48, or 45, or 35, or even 10 – why would a text of 45 pages not count as a book if a text of 49 pages would? On the other hand, could a text of several million words be a book if there were no need to print pages, and the form placed no limits on the extent? Once content and form are no longer tied together in the print-on-paper book, it becomes less clear what a book is, and hence what distinguishes, if anything does, a text from a book. Is an ebook simply an electronic text, or is an ebook a species of electronic text that has certain distinguishing properties – and, if so, what are those properties?

These are all perfectly legitimate questions that have exercised commentators, innovators and scholars since the beginnings of the digital revolution, and we will return to them in a later chapter. But for now, I will take a more pragmatic, historical approach: when did the term ‘ebook’ and its cognates enter our vocabulary, who used these terms, and what did they use them to refer to?

The origins and rise of the ebook

The terms ‘electronic book’, ‘e-book’ and ‘ebook’ came into general circulation in the 1980s. The American computer scientist and specialist in computer graphics Andries van Dam is usually credited with coining the term ‘electronic book’, though related work on the characteristics of electronic document systems was being done as early as the 1960s by Theodore Nelson, Douglas Engelbart and others.² The creation of the first actual ebook is usually attributed to a chance event in July 1971. Michael Hart, a freshman at the University of Illinois, decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University’s Materials Research Lab rather than walk home and then have to return the next day.³ On the way to the Lab, he stopped at a shop to pick up some groceries for the night ahead, and when they packed the groceries they put in the bag a faux parchment copy of the US Declaration of Independence. That night at the Lab, Michael was fortuitously given a computer operator’s account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time – 100 million dollars’ worth – credited to it. As he unpacked his groceries, thinking about what to do with all that computer time, the faux parchment copy of the Declaration of Independence fell out of the bag, and that gave him an idea: why not type in the Declaration of Independence and make it as widely available as possible? That was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. The plan was to find books and documents in the public domain that would be of general interest, key them into the computer and make them available in the simplest electronic form possible – ‘Plain Vanilla ASCII’ – so that they could be easily shared. A book would be turned into a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with capital letters used where italics, bold or underlined text appeared in the printed text. After typing in the Declaration of Independence, Michael typed in the Bill of Rights and a volunteer keyed in the US Constitution, followed by the Bible and Shakespeare, one play at a time. And so the process continued, text by text, and eventually, by August 1997, Project Gutenberg had created 1,000 ebooks, ranging from the King James Bible and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to La Divina Commedia, in Italian.

Project Gutenberg was, and remains, an open archive of ebooks that can be downloaded for free, but, in the course of the 1990s, many publishers also began to explore the possibility of making some of their books available as ebooks. The main difference between initiatives like Project Gutenberg and the first forays of publishers into the emerging world of ebooks was that publishers were dealing for the most part with material that was under copyright, rather than public-domain documents, and hence publishers...