fiction – both genre fiction and general fiction. This can be explained by the fact that the categories of genre fiction and general fiction will contain a higher proportion of books that are: (a) likely to display the character of pure narrative text, without illustrations; (b) likely to be read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience; and (c) likely to be turned over quickly as the reader moves on to a new reading experience. The categories of narrative nonfiction, by comparison, will contain a higher proportion of books that are likely to contain illustrations, to be read more slowly and discontinuously as the reader moves back and forth in the text, and to have a lower turnover rate, since the reader may want to hold on to the book with a view to returning to it at some later point in time.
It is worth dwelling for a moment on business and economic books in relation to other categories. As I noted earlier, many commentators in the early 2000s predicted that, when the ebook revolution came, it would be driven primarily by businessmen reading business books on their digital devices – the tech-savvy international jet-setters using spare moments at airports to keep up with the latest literature on business trends. In practice, business and economics books have performed very modestly when it comes to ebook uptake – relatively slow to take off, rising to 20 per cent by 2014 and then falling back to 15 per cent in 2015. This is well below the levels reached by fiction and other categories of narrative nonfiction, like biography/autobiography and history – the commentators in the early 2000s were wide of the mark. When ebooks did eventually take off, the dramatic growth was driven less by businessmen reading business books in airport lounges and more by women reading romance novels on their Kindles (most romance readers are women). Viewed through the lens of the model developed here, the relatively low ebook uptake of business books is not surprising. Many business and economics books are not the kind of books that you would typically read quickly and continuously in an immersive reading experience: they are more likely to be books that you would read more slowly and even discontinuously, where you may want to move back and forth in the text in order to remind yourself of information provided or points made earlier in the text. They are also books that you may want to come back to at a later point, consult again and use more like a reference work than a book that could be quickly read and then discarded. These features would suggest that business and economics books would perform more like self-help books and family and relationship books than fiction, and this is indeed what has happened.
Form vs format
What, if anything, does the experience of ebook sales since 2008 tell us about the likely impact of the digital revolution on the form of the book? Does it suggest that the digital revolution, by separating the symbolic content of the book from the print-on-paper medium in which it was traditionally embedded, has liberated the book from the constraints that were imposed on it by the medium of print and paved the way for a thorough re-invention of the book as a textual entity that displays very different characteristics from the entity we have come to know as ‘the book’? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were many who speculated that the book would be re-invented in this way, that the very form of the book – that is, the way in which the text was organized, typically as a work of a certain length arranged as a sequence of chapters, etc. – could be and would be radically reworked in the digital age when the constraints imposed by the medium of print would fall away. One well-known example of this kind of thinking is Robert Darnton’s pyramid model of the scholarly book: a book no longer written as a straight linear text but constructed in multiple layers where the linear text is merely the top layer of a complex digital architecture that contains many more layers, enabling the reader to tack back and forth between a summary account on the surface and rich layers of documentation and illustrative material in the layers below.9 There are many examples in the world of trade publishing too: the digital book conceived of no longer as a capsule of content that can be embedded in a physical form of 200 or 300 pages of printed text, but rather as a book that exists entirely and exclusively in the digital medium, a book that is born digital and exists digitally sui generis. It may never have a physical equivalent, or, if it does, the physical book may be but a partial and subsequent realization, in print-on-paper, of content that was conceived of in relation to, and created for, a digital medium.
In the next chapter, we’ll look in detail at some of the attempts that have been made in the world of trade publishing to re-invent the book as a digital entity and examine what came of them, but here I want to reflect on what we can learn from the pattern of ebook sales at mainstream trade publishers from 2008 to the present: does this pattern suggest that the form of the book is being re-invented in the digital medium? Or does it suggest that the digital medium has provided publishers with just another format in which the book, which remains largely unchanged in terms of its organizational features, can be packaged and made available to readers?
My view is that what we have witnessed so far is not so much the invention of a new form of the book, as some of the more radical proponents of the ebook revolution promised, but rather the creation of a new format for the book, which, in terms of its basic organizational features, has remained largely unchanged by the digital revolution. The creation of a new format is certainly not insignificant and it has major implications for the book publishing industry and the many players within it. But it is nowhere near as disruptive as it might have been – or could conceivably still be – if the very form of the book were being re-invented. Let’s explore this distinction a little further.
By the ‘form’ of the book, I mean the way that the symbolic content that makes up the book is structured – e.g., as a sequence of chapters organized in a certain way, extended in length, etc. The ‘format’ of the book is the way that the book is packaged and presented to readers; the same book, structured in the same way, can be packaged and presented in multiple different formats without altering its form. (I elaborate this distinction in more detail in chapter 12.) To say that the digital revolution so far has created a new format for the book but has not changed its form is to say that, for the most part, books remain structured in the same way as they were prior to the digital revolution, but that they are now being packaged and presented to readers in new ways: that is, in a new format – the ebook.
The history of book publishing has been characterized repeatedly by the invention of new formats (or the relaunching of formats previously invented). The classic example of this was Allen Lane’s launching of a new series of cheap sixpenny paperbacks in the 1930s. These were books previously published by other publishers as hardbacks – typically at 7s 6d for a novel, and 12s 6d for a biography or history book – licensed by Allen Lane and reissued in a cheap paperback edition, priced at a mere sixpence, as part of a new series with a distinctive and recognizable brand: Penguin. The paperback itself, as a physical object, was not invented by Lane – paperback books had existed in the late nineteenth century and before, though they were generally regarded as ‘a lower form of life’.10 Part of Lane’s genius was to rebrand the paperback as a stylish new format that occupied a legitimate and valued position in the marketplace and in the life-cycle of the book. ‘We aimed at making something pretty smart, a product clean and as bright as two pins, modern enough not to offend the fastidious high-brow, and yet straightforward and unpretentious’, reflected Lane.11 He had sensed an emerging market – an expanding middle class with a degree of disposable income and an interest in reading good books if they were priced affordably – and he created a new and effective way of repackaging books to serve this market.
Not that it was all plain sailing. Lane faced much resistance at the time, especially from publishers and booksellers who felt that pricing books so cheaply would only result in people spending less money on books. ‘Nobody can live off sixpenny books’, remarked Charles Evans of Heinemann. ‘Nobody makes any money out of them except the Penguin publishers and possibly their printers.’12 Evans refused to license Enid Bagnold’s bestselling novel National Velvet to Penguin, despite repeated pleas by the author. But over time the inexpensive paperback edition championed by Allen Lane and epitomized by Penguin would establish itself as a legitimate format – that is, as another way in which the same content can be repackaged, re-priced
