Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States

Citation

Line, M.B. (2005), "Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 33 No. 4, pp. 221-222. https://doi.org/10.1108/02641619510635696

To judge by the selected quotations from experts in the publishing world printed on the back cover, and making allowances for the fact that they are only selections, this is an outstanding work. “Extensive and rigorous study”, “rigorous and comprehensive review”, “masterly study”, “perceptive and illuminating analysis” are among the comments. Are the expectations raised justified?

First of all, are there not plenty of books, and many more articles, on publishing? Well, yes, but they are nearly all written by people intimately involved in publishing, and are usually highly personal in content and tone; or they are out of date, and even if published fairly recently do not reflect the huge changes that have occurred in publishing in the last few years. Much writing about book publishing ten years ago confidently prophesied the death of the printed book, strangled or starved by the e‐book in one form or another; these predictions have not been fulfilled. This book is written by an outsider – Thompson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge – and is based on three years of research, which involved 230 intensive interviews with British and American publishers and editors.

Second, as the subtitle indicates, the book is restricted to academic and higher education publishing in two major publishing countries. The author states that these areas have been rather neglected in favour of trade publishing, although they account for about a third of all new books published in the UK (he points out that the turnover of the British publishing industry as a whole is half as large again as the pharmaceutical industry). Also, “it makes a vital contribution to the broader sphere of public discussion and debate”. Thompson believes that in any case it is useful to conceptualise book publishing as a set of publishing fields each with its own history and characteristics.

Third, and importantly, book publishing is seen in a broad economic and social context, the author believing it can be properly understood only in such a context.

The main title is somewhat misleading; the subtitle is a much truer indicator of content. Moreover, although it is clear that the present age is a digital age, the title implies that the work is about the impact of digitisation. In fact, while technology is mentioned many times throughout, only the last quarter is devoted to digitisation. The bulk consists of a detailed analysis of recent and current trends in publishing in the two countries specified.

Thompson identifies four especially important developments in publishing: the growing concentration of resources; the changing structure of markets and channels to market; the globalisation of markets and publishing firms; and the impact of new technologies.

Part I, “The publishing business”, is a thorough if fairly routine account of the publishing cycle and chain, the structure of publishing fields, the scale of output, the concentration and globalisation of publishing and the retail sector, and the impact of new technologies, especially online retail (Amazon etc.).

Part II, “The field of academic publishing”, discusses first various pressures, including that put on their main market, academic libraries, by serials growth and prices and the introduction of IT. It goes on to look at the various strategies publishers have used to reduce costs, to become more selective in what they accept, to diversify into trade and textbook publishing, and to expand their markets. Some have abandoned scholarly works for textbook publishing. While academic presses recognise their continued role in disseminating scholarly books, and while the pressure from universities to publish increases with the great growth in the number of doctorates awarded and (in the US) the close link between book publication and academic tenure, simple economics enforces reductions in output. Even giants like OUP, which also has a huge trade publishing operation, are not immune.

Part III deals similarly with “The field of higher education publishing”. Here there has been an even greater concentration on a few publishers. An important feature of textbook publishing is that while the users are students, the market consists of teachers. The US and UK scenes here are quite different, not only in that the US has 14 times as many students in higher education, and that the use made of textbooks is different – US courses are often built around one major text –, but that there is a vastly bigger traffic in used books in the US, where students sell most of their books on to other students after use, leading to “sell‐on breakdown”. In both countries the quality of textbook production, and hence the cost, has greatly increased. Another factor in increased costs is investment in IT. The profits to be made from successful textbooks have led to greater similarity between their contents, and to more intense competition. The production of course packs is a more recent phenomenon. The future is seen as one of further consolidation, polarisation into core and fringe areas, intensified struggles for content and market share, and increasing localization of global corporations.

“The digital revolution” itself occupies Part IV. As we all know now, early enthusiasm and substantial investment in e‐books, with the expectation of handsome profits, was followed by disillusionment, with the collapse of several schemes; and this in turn has been followed by cautious experimentation. A main reason for lack of success was an old one: producers offered what technology could do, rather than what people wanted. As Thompson points out, it is sensible to identify what sorts of content are most suited to digitisation, e.g. reference works rather than continuous text. Digital books can of course do things that conventional printed books cannot, e.g. include access to sounds and moving images. Four models for academic book publishing are presented: the virtual library model (examples considered are netLibrary, Questia and ebrary); the digital warehouse model; the scholarly corpus model (e.g. Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO), Gutenberg < e>, the History Ebook Project, TORCH, and, very recently, Oxford Scholarship Online, which treats monographs as if they were scholarly journal issues, made up of discrete chapters); and the scholarly community model (e.g. Cognet). Lessons, problems and prospects are then considered. In higher education publishing, there is a similar story of wildly hopeful expectation followed by disappointment, as e‐textbooks failed to take off, for reasons that seemed obvious to many at the time (including the variety of reading devices and the incompatibility of software). But electronic production offers far too much to be abandoned, and some initiatives are proving promising or even successful. Dual‐format (print plus electronic) publication shows promise, as do the use of online access for supplementary material, the production of customised texts, and pre‐packaged online courses. Special attention is given to Chadwyck‐Healey's LION (Literature Online), which evolved from a series of CD‐ROM databases in English literature.

The last substantive chapter discusses the “hidden revolution” which is “transforming the life cycle of the book”. “It's not so much a revolution in the product as a revolution in the process” [italics are the author's]. “The e‐book is merely a symptom of a … transformation … which has reconstituted the book as a digital file – that is, as a database … So far from spelling the demise of the printed book, the reconstitution of the book as a digital file has enabled publishers to bring old books back to life and to keep slow‐selling titles in print in perpetuity.” The chapter goes on to explain this transformation.

The author concludes that while “the technologies linked to digitisation are … revolutionising the industries that have traditionally been concerned with the creation and dissemination of symbolic content, … if we want to understand how the digital revolution is affecting … the creative industries, we have to situate these developments within the context of a much more profound analysis of these industries  … . Technologies do not transform social practices in and by themselves …; rather, technologies are taken up and used by agents in specific contexts … the digital revolution is part, but only part, of a profound series of changes that are transforming these industries today” (much the same could be said about libraries). His near‐final words are “the printed book is likely to prove a much more resilient cultural artefact than … harbingers of a new age were suggesting.” Many of us in the LIS professions had reached a similar conclusion, albeit on rather different grounds; it is good to have our views reinforced. And since I am reviewing the book for Interlending & Document Supply, it is worth adding that if Thompson is right, the business of the remote supply of books at least will be with us for a long time yet.

This book is very substantial in its size – not only are there 440 pages of text, but each page has c.800 words – and equally substantial in its contents. Everything is closely argued and thoroughly documented with facts and figures, and the use of quotations from interviewees helps to anchor the text to the ground. No work on publishing that I know of approaches its objective scrutiny and analysis of the current publishing situation. Moreover, it is very readable. I cannot commend it too highly, not only to its presumed core audience of publishers, but to university administrators and librarians, who are intimately involved in the matters dealt with by Thompson, in both causes and effects. The accolades on the cover are more than justified.

The volume seems to be free of misprints. I have only two small complaints. As stated above, the subtitle should have been the main one. Secondly, with its unsown, tightly glued binding (how did this practice ever come to be known as “perfect” binding?); the paperback version simply will not stay open except when firmly held with both hands – or when the spine is broken, something no publisher would wish. At least e‐books do not suffer from this problem.