printing changed all that. The basic technology for digital printing had existed since the late 1970s, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that the technology was developed in ways that would enable it to become a serious alternative to the traditional offset presses. As reproduction quality improved and costs came down, a variety of new players entered the field, offering a range of digital printing services to publishers. It was now possible to keep a backlist title in print by sending the file to a digital printer who could reprint small quantities – 10, 20, 100 or 200 copies, far fewer than would have been possible using traditional offset methods. The unit costs were higher than they were with traditional offset printing but still manageable for the publisher, especially if they were willing to raise the retail price. It was even possible to turn the traditional publishing fulfilment model on its head: rather than printing a fixed quantity of books and putting them in a warehouse to wait for them to be ordered and sold, the publisher could give the file to a print-on-demand supplier like Lightning Source, who would hold the file on its server and print a copy of the book only when it received an order for it. In this way, the publisher could keep the book permanently available without having to hold stock in a warehouse: physical stock was replaced by a ‘virtual warehouse’.
By the early 2000s, many publishers in the English-speaking world were using some version of digital printing for their slower-moving backlist titles, whether short-run digital printing or true print-on-demand. Those in the fields of academic and professional publishing were among the first to take advantage of these new opportunities: many of their books were specialized works that sold in small quantities at high prices, and were therefore well suited to digital printing. Many trade publishers were accustomed to dealing in the larger print quantities for which offset printing is ideal, but they too came to realize – in some cases spurred on by the long-tail thesis first put forward by Chris Anderson in 20044 – that there was value locked up in some older backlist titles that could be captured by using digital print technology. Publishers – academic, professional and trade – began to mine their backlists, looking for older titles for which they still held the copyright, scanning them, turning them into PDFs and re-releasing them as digitally printed books. Titles that had been put out of print many years ago found themselves being brought back to life. Thanks to digital printing, publishers no longer had to put books out of print at all: they could simply reprint in small quantities or put the file in a print-on-demand programme, thereby keeping the title available in perpetuity. This was one of the first great ironies of the digital revolution in publishing: far from killing off the printed book, the digital revolution gave it a new lease of life, enabling it to live well beyond the age at which it would have died in the pre-digital world. From now on, many books would never go out of print.
These developments in print technology, together with the substantial reduction in costs associated with the digitization of typesetting and book design, also greatly lowered the barriers to entry and opened the way for new start-ups to enter the publishing field. It was now easier than ever to set up a publishing company, typeset and design a book using desktop publishing software on a PC or a Mac, and print in small quantities – or even one at a time – using a digital printer or print-on-demand service. The digital revolution spawned a proliferation of small publishing operations. It also opened the way for an explosion in self-publishing – a process that began in earnest in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the appearance of a variety of organizations using print-on-demand technology, but took on a new character from around 2010, when a plethora of new players entered the self-publishing field.
While these developments were dramatic in their own way, they were only the first stages in a process of transformation that would soon prove to be far more challenging for the established structures and players of Anglo-American trade publishing. With the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the weaving together of information and communication technologies and the growing availability of personal computers and mobile devices with high-speed internet connections, it became possible not just to transform supply chains, back-office systems and production processes, but also to revolutionize the ways in which customers, i.e. readers, acquire books, the form in which they acquire them and, indeed, the ways in which the readers of books relate to those who write them. The traditional print-on-paper book, and the industry that had grown up over a period of some 500 years to produce this object and distribute it to readers through a network of retail outlets, constituted, in effect, a channel of communication that put one set of individuals (writers) in communication with another set of individuals (readers) through a particular medium (the book) and a ramified network of organizations and intermediaries (publishers, printers, wholesalers, retailers, libraries, etc.) which made this communication process possible. The great challenge posed by the digital revolution to creative industries like publishing is that it opened up the possibility of creating entirely new channels of communication between creators and consumers that would bypass the intermediaries that had hitherto enabled this process to take place. Traditional players could be ‘disintermediated’ – that is, cut out of the supply chain altogether.
Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the disruptive potential of this aspect of the digital revolution was provided by the music industry. For decades, the music industry, dominated by a small number of major record labels, had been based on an economic model in which recorded music was inscribed in a physical medium, traditionally the vinyl LP, and sold through a network of retail outlets. The first major impact of the digital revolution on the music industry – the development of the CD in the 1980s – did not fundamentally disrupt this model: on the contrary, it simply substituted one physical medium for another and resulted in a surge in sales as consumers replaced their LPs and cassette tapes with CDs. But the development of the MP3 format in 1996, and the coming together in the late 1990s and early 2000s of personal computers and the internet, resulted in a sudden and dramatic change in the way that music was acquired, shared and consumed. Very quickly, the world of recorded music changed from one in which consumers bought albums in bricks-and-mortar stores, occasionally sharing them with friends, to a world in which music could be downloaded, uploaded and shared online, potentially with anyone who had access to the internet.
The explosive implications of this transformation were highlighted most vividly by Napster, the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service that was launched in 1999. The site catalogued the music files of millions of users so you could see who had what, and then enabled you to download a file from a remote PC, seamlessly and with no money changing hands. Napster grew exponentially – at its peak, it had 80 million registered users worldwide. As music sales began to decline, the music companies and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster for infringement of copyright, succeeding in closing it down in 2001. But the genie was out of the bottle and the short life of Napster brought home to everyone the massive disruptive potential of online distribution. A plethora of P2P file-sharing services flourished in the wake of Napster’s demise, many using the BitTorrent protocol that gathers bits of a file from a variety of hosts rather than downloading a file from a single server, making it much harder to shut down.
Quite apart from P2P file sharing, legitimate channels for the online distribution of music grew rapidly in the early 2000s. Apple, the most significant of these, launched the iTunes music player in 2001, the same year that it released the iPod MP3 player, and added the iTunes music store in 2003. Now it was possible for customers to download songs, perfectly legally, for 99¢ a track. By 2008, Apple had become the number one music retailer in the US, outstripping Walmart, Best Buy and Target. During the same period, the sales of CDs in the US collapsed, from 938 million units in 1999 to 296 million in 2009, less than a third of what they had been a decade earlier.5 Total revenues from US recorded music sales also plummeted, falling from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $7.8 billion in 2009.6 The collapse of revenues was cataclysmic, as can be seen in figure 0.1.
Figure 0.1 US recorded music revenues by format, 1998–2010
Note: revenues are for cassettes,
