any information or symbolic content – into sequences of digits (or streams of bits) that can be processed, stored and transmitted as data. Once information takes the form of digitized data, it can be easily manipulated, stored, combined with other data and transmitted using networks of various kinds. Now we’re in a new world, very different from the world of physical objects like cars, refrigerators and print-on-paper books. It is a world of weightless data that can be subjected to a whole new set of processes and transmitted via networks that have their own distinctive properties. And the more that publishing is drawn into this new world, the further it moves away from the old world of physical objects which had been its home since the time of Gutenberg. In short, the symbolic content of the book is no longer tied to the physical print-on-paper object in which it was traditionally embedded.
This, in essence, is why the digital revolution has such far-reaching consequences for the publishing industry and for other sectors of the media and creative industries: digitization enables symbolic content to be transformed into data and separated from the material medium or substratum in which it has been embedded hitherto. In this respect, publishing is very different from, say, the car industry: while the car industry can be (and has been) transformed in many ways by the application of digital technologies, the car itself will always be a physical object with an engine, wheels, doors, windows, etc., even if it no longer has a driver. Not so the book. The fact that, for more than 500 years, we have come to associate the book with a physical object made with ink, paper and glue is, in itself, a historical contingency, not a necessary feature of the book as such. The print-on-paper book is a material medium in which a specific kind of symbolic content – a story, for example – can be realized or embedded. But there were other media in the past (such as clay tablets and papyrus) and there could be other media in the future. And if the content can be codified digitally, then the need to embed that content in a particular material substratum like print-on-paper, in order to record, manipulate and transmit it, disappears. The content exists virtually as a code, a particular sequence of 0s and 1s.
But the digital revolution did much more than this: it transformed the whole information and communication environment of contemporary societies. By bringing together information technology, computers and telecommunications, the digital revolution enabled ever-increasing quantities of digitized information to be transmitted at enormous speeds, thereby creating new networks of communication and information flow on a scale that was unprecedented. The informational life-worlds of ordinary people were changing as never before. Soon they would be carrying around in their pocket or bag a small device that would function simultaneously as a phone, a map and a computer, enabling them to stay permanently connected to others, to pinpoint their location and get directions, and to access vast quantities of information at the touch of a screen. Traditional creative industries like publishing found themselves caught up in a vortex of change that deeply affected their businesses, but over which they had little or no control. This was a process that was being driven by others – by large technology companies based primarily on the West Coast of the US, far away from the traditional heartlands of Anglo-American trade publishing. These companies were governed by different principles and animated by an ethos that was alien to the traditional world of publishing, and yet their activities were creating a new kind of information environment to which the old world of publishing would have to adapt.
The area of book publishing where the disruptive impact of the digital revolution was first experienced was not in the sphere of consumption, however: it was in the sphere of production. The traditional methods of the publishing industry, whereby a manuscript was received from an author, usually in the form of a typescript, and then edited, copyedited and marked up for the typesetter, were swept aside as the entire production process was turned, step by step, into a digital workflow. Indeed, as more and more authors began to compose their texts by typing on the keys of a computer rather than using a pen and paper or a typewriter, the text became a digital file from the moment of creation – it was born digital, existing only as a sequence of 0s and 1s stored on a disc or in the memory of a computer. The material forms of writing were changing,2 and, from that point on, the transformation of the text that leads to the creation of the object that we call ‘the book’ could, at least in principle, be done entirely in digital form: it could be edited on screen, revised and corrected on screen, marked up for the typesetter on screen, designed and typeset on screen. From the viewpoint of the production process, the book was reconstituted as a digital file, a database. To a production manager in a publishing house, that’s all the book now is: a file of information that has been manipulated, coded and tagged in certain ways. The reconstitution of the book as a digital file is a crucial part of what I call ‘the hidden revolution’.3 By that, I mean a revolution not in the product but rather in the process: even if the final product looks the same as it always did, a physical book with ink printed on paper, the process by which this book is produced is now completely different.
While all these steps in the production process could in principle be done digitally, it was never so easy in practice. Digitization did not always simplify things – on the contrary, it often made them more complex. The digital world, with its plethora of file types and formats, programming languages, hardwares, softwares and constant upgrades, is in many ways more complicated than the old analogue world of print. A central part of the history of the publishing industry since the early 1980s has been the progressive application of the digital revolution to the various stages of book production. Typesetting was one of the first areas to be affected. The old linotype machines, which were the standard means of typesetting in the 1970s and before, were replaced in the 1980s by big IBM mainframe typesetting machines and then, in the 1990s, by desktop publishing. Typesetting costs plummeted: whereas, in the 1970s, it typically cost $10 a page to get a book typeset from manuscript, by 2000 it was costing between $4 and $5 a page, despite the decrease in the value of the dollar produced by two decades of inflation. While the shift was decisive and dramatic, it was a confusing time for those who lived through the changes and found themselves having to adapt to new ways of doing things. The job of the typesetter was redefined and lines of responsibility were blurred. Some of the tasks formerly carried out by typesetters were eliminated and others were thrown back on in-house production staff, who suddenly found themselves on the front line of the digital revolution in publishing, obliged to use new technologies and learn new programmes that were themselves constantly changing.
By the mid-1990s, many of the technical aspects of book production, including typesetting and page design, had been thoroughly transformed by the application of digital technologies. Progress was more erratic in other areas, such as editing and printing: here too there were aspects of the workflow that became increasingly digital in character, though in ways that were more complex than a one-way shift from analogue to digital. While many authors were composing texts on computers and hence creating digital files, their files were often too full of errors for publishers to use. It was often easier and cheaper for the publisher to print out the text, edit and mark-up the printed page, and then send the edited and marked-up manuscript to a compositor in Asia who would re-key the text and add the tags for the page layout. So while in principle the author’s keystrokes were the point at which the digital workflow could begin, in practice – at least in trade publishing – the digital workflow typically began at a later point, when the edited and marked-up manuscript was re-keyed by the compositor, who supplied the publisher with a file that included additional functionality.
Printing is another area where digitization had a huge impact, though again in ways that were more complex than a simple one-way shift from analogue to digital. Until the late 1990s, most publishers used traditional offset printing for all of their books. Offset has many advantages: print quality is high, illustrations can be reproduced to a high standard and there are significant economies of scale – the more you print, the lower the unit cost. But there are disadvantages too: most notably, there are significant set-up costs, so it is uneconomic to print small quantities. So backlist titles that were selling a few hundred copies or less per year were commonly put out of print by many publishers, and the large trade houses often drew the line much higher. It simply wasn’t economic for them to keep these books in print, taking up space in the warehouse and reprinting in small quantities if and when the stock ran out.
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