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
