Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty‐First Century (2nd ed.)

Citation

Calvert, P. (2012), "Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty‐First Century (2nd ed.)", The Electronic Library, Vol. 30 No. 5, pp. 750-751. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471211275783

It has always struck me as rather odd that some librarians, particularity the younger ones, seem to regard publishers as separate and apart from librarianship, almost like the enemy. Recent arguments over the merits of copyright seem to have hardened these attitudes. Of course not all librarians think like this, and nor should we, for publishers have been our partners in the provision of books and other materials for much more than a century, and we can anticipate this mutually strengthening relationship to continue for quite some time yet. I would be happy if my students read the first few chapters of this book so that they fully understood the many ways that publishers add value to the raw content provided by the authors. It is also necessary for us to understand the enormous changes that have taken place in the publishing and book retail industries over the last few decades. Who could have imagined as little as ten years ago that Borders, one of the giants of book retail in 2001, would be gone by 2011? The role of online bookselling, especially the growth of amazon.com, is well explained by Thompson.

The most significant part of this book for readers of The Electronic Library is chapter 9 called The Digital Revolution. It describes with brutal honesty how the publishing industry misjudged the impact of electronic books, first in the nineties by over‐estimating how quickly they would be accepted by the reading public and then, more recently, under‐estimating how sales would change with the advent of new eBook readers. It was not the acceptability of the eBooks themselves that made the real difference, but the appearance of user‐friendly devices we could read them on. It was the Amazon Kindle launched in late 2008 that was the first dedicated eBook reader to get a real foothold in the market, then the iPad of 2010 produced a second surge of eBook sales. A point that Thompson alludes to is how we treat books as combinations of text and artefact, and perhaps eBooks were never going to be accepted by the general book buying public until there were devices that made us feel comfortable with the artefact once more. Chapter 9 also contains an interesting description of how a publisher builds up its own digital archive. There are comments on the problem of piracy and the role of Digital Rights Management, which no doubt some librarians will argue with, but it is good to read the publisher's point of view.

This is a splendid book that librarians should read. It is regrettable to say it, but I doubt all that many will.