Book Wars
The Digital Revolution in Publishing
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- 16,99 €
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- 16,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
This book tells the story of the turbulent decades when the book publishing industry collided with the great technological revolution of our time. From the surge of ebooks to the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks, Book Wars provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of technological disruption in one of our most important and successful creative industries.
Like other sectors, publishing has been thrown into disarray by the digital revolution. The foundation on which this industry had been based for 500 years – the packaging and sale of words and images in the form of printed books – was called into question by a technological revolution that enabled symbolic content to be stored, manipulated and transmitted quickly and cheaply. Publishers and retailers found themselves facing a proliferation of new players who were offering new products and services and challenging some of their most deeply held principles and beliefs. The old industry was suddenly thrust into the limelight as bitter conflicts erupted between publishers and new entrants, including powerful new tech giants who saw the world in very different ways. The book wars had begun.
While ebooks were at the heart of many of these conflicts, Thompson argues that the most fundamental consequences lie elsewhere. The print-on-paper book has proven to be a remarkably resilient cultural form, but the digital revolution has transformed the industry in other ways, spawning new players which now wield unprecedented power and giving rise to an array of new publishing forms. Most important of all, it has transformed the broader information and communication environment, creating new challenges and new opportunities for publishers as they seek to redefine their role in the digital age.
This unrivalled account of the book publishing industry as it faces its greatest challenge since Gutenberg will be essential reading for anyone interested in books and their future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sociologist Thompson (Merchants of Culture) investigates the impact of digital technologies on the publishing industry in this insightful and intelligent history. Asking "what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time," Thompson examines the impact of e-books on the business, concluding that the central tension in modern publishing is "different ways of thinking about content and... generating power." Where publishers have seen books as a profit stream, large tech companies such as Amazon (with its creation of the Kindle) and Google (with its ambitious book scanning project) instead see them as a means to an end, leveraging them to draw in users for the purpose of gaining data that they can monetize in other ways. Thompson also covers such topics as self-publishing (which diminishes publishers' ability to gatekeep), access to capital via crowdfunding, and subscription services as they moved from TV and music into the book world. Thompson knows his material, but the granularity he gets into—the workflow of audiobook narrators, the marketing methods behind sites such as Book Bub—might be more than general readers are interested in. Still, the attention to detail is sure to fascinate bibliophiles and anyone with an interest in the industry.