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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Writing about a present-day industry is always going to be like shooting at a moving target: no sooner have you finished the text than your subject matter has changed – things happen, events move on and the industry you had captured at a particular point in time now looks slightly different. Immediate obsolescence is the fate that awaits every chronicler of the present. There is no remedy apart from revising and updating the text if and when the opportunity presents itself, though even then you will always remain a step behind the flow of events, freezing a world at the very moment that it slips away from you.
Thirty or forty years ago, the risks of obsolescence would not have seemed so great to someone writing about the book publishing industry: sure, the industry was changing in important ways, but the basic principles and practices that characterized the industry were not being called into question. Publishing houses were being bought up by large corporations, retail chains and literary agents were becoming more powerful and the traditional world of trade publishing was being transformed into a big business. But the book itself as a cultural object – that unique combination of print and paper, the fusing together of the written word and the material artefact – was being produced in much the same way as it had been for centuries. Today that is no longer so. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century the oldest of the media industries finds itself in the throes of tumultuous change, struggling to cope with the impact of a technological revolution that is stripping away some of the old certainties, undermining traditional models and opening up new possibilities in ways that are at once exciting and disorientating. What once seemed like a quiet backwater of the media industries has suddenly become news.
In preparing the text for the paperback edition I have concentrated on ensuring that the book takes account of significant new developments and that empirical data are updated where it is important to do so. There are many contexts where data from 2008 or 2009 continue to provide a good picture of how the industry looks today, and I have therefore left the figures as they were. But there are other contexts, especially in the chapter on the digital revolution, where a more thorough updating was necessary – when you’re in the midst of a revolution, two years can seem like an eternity. I returned to around 20 of my sources in London and New York and spoke with them about the changes that have taken place, partly in order to make sure that I was fully apprised of the most important developments but also in order to see how their views have altered over time as they have struggled to cope with the changes swirling around them. Once again, I am enormously grateful to these individuals – who will, as before, remain anonymous – for their time, generosity and openness. However, I have resisted the temptation to rewrite the text and revisit every actor and organization: while much has happened, the basic structures and dynamics of the world of Anglo-American trade publishing remain pretty much as I described them. Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that these structures and dynamics will be transformed over time by the changes currently taking place: no one should ever underestimate the disruptive potential of new technologies. But at the same time we must see that the development and implementation of new technologies are always part and parcel of a broader set of social relations in which agents and organizations are bound together in relations of cooperation, competition and sometimes conflict with one another, and where outcomes are shaped as much by structures of power as they are by the intrinsic properties of technologies as such. This book describes those structures, shows how they arose, how they shape the practices of actors in the field and how they are changing today, and it intentionally leaves open the question of how far these structures will be altered in a future that remains – and is likely to remain for some while to come – uncertain.
J.B.T., Cambridge
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
It is a matter of some puzzlement that the one sector of the creative industries about which we know very little is the sector that has been with us for the longest time – the book publishing industry. First established in the fifteenth century thanks to the celebrated inventions of a goldsmith in Mainz, the printing and publishing of books is a business that has been around for more than half a millennium, and yet we know very little about how this industry is organized today and how it is changing. Books continue to command a good deal of attention in newspapers, radio and other media; they remain a staple source of inspiration and raw material for films and other forms of popular entertainment; and writers – especially novelists, historians and scientists – are still endowed with a stature in our societies, an aura even, that is accorded to few other professions. But on the rare occasions when the publishing industry itself comes under public scrutiny, more often than not it is because another journalist is eager to announce that, with the coming of the digital age, the publishing industry as we know it is doomed. Few industries have had their death foretold more frequently than the book publishing industry, and yet somehow, miraculously, it seems to have survived them all – at least till now.
It was partly with the aim of filling this lacuna in our understanding that I set out, nearly a decade ago, to study systematically the contemporary book publishing industry. I began by working on a sector of the industry that was close to my own world as an academic – namely, the field of academic publishing, which included the university presses, the commercial academic publishers (like Taylor & Francis, Palgrave Macmillan and SAGE Publications) and the college textbook publishers (like Pearson and McGraw-Hill). The results of that research were published in 2005 in Books in the Digital Age. Since then I have immersed myself in a very different world – that of general interest trade publishing, the world of bestsellers like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, of brand-name authors like Stephen King and John Grisham, of the many styles and genres of fiction and non-fiction, from commercial to literary, from misery memoir to serious history, politics and current affairs. I have studied this world in the way that an anthropologist would study the practices of a tribe inhabiting some remote island in the South Pacific, only in this case the tribe lives and works, for the most part, in a small section of an island squeezed between the Hudson and East rivers in New York and on the banks of the Thames in London. Their practices may initially strike the outside observer as strange, even at times bizarre. But the assumption underlying my work is that once we understand the structure of this world and how it has evolved over time, even the most surprising things do not seem so strange after all.
The research for this book was carried out over a period of four years, from 2005 to 2009; I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK for a generous grant (RES-000-22-1292) which supported this research and enabled me to spend extended periods of time in
