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
