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During the last few decades, we have been living through a technological revolution that is as radical and far-reaching as any that came before in the long history of the human species. Among other things, this new revolution is transforming our information and communication environment and disrupting many of the industries that played a central role in shaping this environment for most of the twentieth century and before. The traditional media industries – newspapers, radio, television, music, cinema – have all been hurled into a whirlpool of change as old analogue technologies were pushed aside by new technologies based on the digital codification and transmission of symbolic content. Many of the media institutions that were key players in the analogue age have found themselves threatened by the digital transition, their revenues collapsing and their once-dominant positions undermined, while powerful new players have emerged and begun to reshape the contours of our information space. Today we live in a world which, in terms of the forms and channels of information and communication, is fundamentally different from the world that existed just half a century ago.

The book publishing industry is no exception – it too has been caught up in the turmoil brought about by the digital revolution. And, in some ways, there is more at stake here than with other media industries: not only is the book publishing industry the oldest of the media industries, it is also an industry that has played a pivotal role in the shaping of modern culture, from the scientific revolution in early modern Europe to the profusion of literatures and forms of knowledge that have become such an important part of our lives and societies today. So what happens when the oldest of our media industries collides with the great technological revolution of our time? What happens when a media industry that has been with us for more than 500 years and is deeply embedded in our history and culture finds itself confronted by, and threatened by, a new set of technologies that are radically different from those that have underpinned its practices and business models for centuries? If you were working in the book publishing industry during the first decade of the twenty-first century, you wouldn’t have had to look far to find reasons to feel anxious about your future: the music industry was in freefall, the newspaper industry was experiencing a sharp decline in revenue and some of the big tech companies were becoming seriously interested in the digitization of books. Why wouldn’t the book industry be swept up in the maelstrom unleashed by the digital revolution? No hard-headed manager or disinterested analyst would have been sanguine about the chances of the book publishing industry surviving its encounter with the digital revolution unscathed.

But what form would the digital disruption of the book publishing industry assume, exactly? Would the industry undergo a root-and-branch transformation like the music industry, where physical formats morphed into digital downloads and the major record labels that had controlled the production and distribution of music experienced a dramatic collapse in revenues? Would ebooks take off and become the new medium of choice for readers, consigning the print-on-paper book to the dustbin of history? Would bookshops disappear and publishers be disintermediated by a technological revolution that would enable readers and writers to communicate directly via the internet, unhindered by the traditional gatekeepers of the book publishing industry? In the early 2000s, all of these possibilities – and more – were being seriously contemplated, both by senior managers within the industry and by the many commentators and consultants who were happy to offer their views on the future of an industry that seemed to be on the cusp of disruption.

As the years went by, this remarkable encounter between the oldest of our media industries and the great technological revolution of our time gradually took shape, producing outcomes that very few commentators had anticipated. It is not simply that the commentators were wrong – though, in many cases, they were, and wildly so. It is that their ways of thinking about what happens when technologies disrupt established industries were based far too much on the analysis of the technologies themselves and on a belief – usually implicit, rarely examined – that new technologies, by virtue of their intrinsic and advantageous features, would prevail eventually. What seldom featured in these accounts was any real awareness of how the development of new technologies, and their adoption or non-adoption as the case may be, are always embedded in an array of pre-existing social institutions, practices and preferences, and are always part of a dynamic social process in which individuals and organizations are pursuing their own interests and aims, seeking to improve their own positions and out-manoeuvre others in a competitive, and at times ruthless, struggle. In short, what most commentators lacked was any real understanding of the forces that were shaping the particular social space or ‘field’ within which these technologies were being developed and deployed. They focused on the technologies themselves, as if technologies were a deus ex machina that would sweep all before it, without taking account of the complex social processes in which these technologies were embedded and of which they were part. Of course, this abstraction from social processes made the commentators’ task a whole lot easier: the social world is a messy place and it’s much easier to predict the future if you ignore the messiness of the present. But it doesn’t make your predictions more accurate, and you don’t improve our understanding of technological change by discounting the social, economic and political factors that shape the contexts within which technologies exist.

This book is based on the assumption that we can understand the impact of the digital revolution on an industry like book publishing – and indeed any industry, media or otherwise – only by immersing ourselves in the messiness of the social world and understanding how technologies are developed and deployed, how they are taken up or passed over, by individuals and organizations who are situated in certain contexts, guided by certain preferences and pursuing certain ends. Technologies never produce effects ex nihilo, but always in relation to the individuals and organizations who decide to invest time and energy and resources in them as a way of pursuing their interests and aims (whatever they might be). The messiness of the social world is not a distraction from technology’s path but is the path itself, for it is the interaction between the affordances of new technologies – that is, what these technologies enable or make possible – and the messiness of the social world that determines what impact new technologies will have and the extent to which, if at all, they will disrupt existing institutions and practices.

My immersion in the messy world of the publishing industry began two decades ago, when I set out to study the structure and transformation of the modern book publishing industry. I spent five years studying the world of academic publishing in the US and the UK, followed by another five years of deep immersion in the world of Anglo-American trade publishing, and I wrote two books about these worlds, Books in the Digital Age (about academic publishing) and Merchants of Culture (about trade publishing). In both of these books, I devoted a lot of attention to the impact of the digital revolution on these two very different sectors of the book publishing industry – this was a key issue in both sectors of this industry from the mid-1990s on, so no serious study of the publishing industry at this time could ignore it. But understanding the impact of the digital revolution was not my sole or even my primary concern in these earlier studies: my primary concern was to understand the key structural characteristics of these sectors – or ‘fields’ as I called them – and to analyse the dynamics that shaped the evolution of these fields over time. When the digital revolution began to make its presence felt in the world of book publishing, it did so by building upon, and in some cases disrupting, a set of institutions, practices and social relations that already existed and were structured in certain ways. Digital technologies and innovations enabled established organizations to do old things in new ways and to do some new things – to improve the efficiency of their organizations; offer better services to authors, readers and clients; repackage their content; develop new products; and, in a myriad of different ways, develop and strengthen their position in the field. But they also enabled new players to enter the field and challenge incumbent stakeholders by offering new products and services. The proliferation of new players and possibilities created a mixture of excitement, alarm and trepidation in the field and generated a profusion of new initiatives, developments and conflicts, as new entrants sought to gain a foothold in a field that had been dominated hitherto by the established players of the publishing industry. Of course, there was nothing new about conflict and change in the publishing industry – the industry had experienced many periods of turbulence and upheaval in the past. But the turbulence generated by the unfolding of the digital revolution in publishing was unprecedented, both in terms of its specific characteristics and in terms of the scale of the challenges it posed. Suddenly, the very foundations of an industry that had existed for more than 500 years were being called into question as never before. The old industry of book publishing was thrust into the limelight as bitter conflicts erupted between publishers and new entrants, including powerful new tech companies who saw the world in very different ways. Skirmishes turned into battles that were fought out in full public view, in some cases ending up in the courts. The book wars had begun.

Books are part of culture and book wars could be seen as culture wars, but they are not the kind of culture war that is normally referred to by this term. The term ‘culture war’ is commonly used to refer to social and political conflicts based on diverging and deeply held values and beliefs, such as those concerning abortion, affirmative action, sexual orientation, religion, morality and family life. These are conflicts rooted in values and value systems to which many people are deeply attached. They tap into identities as well as interests, into different senses of who we are as individuals and collectivities and of what does and should matter to us – hence the passion with which these culture wars have so often been fought in the public domain. The book wars are a very different kind of conflict. They don’t arouse the passions as the culture wars do, no one has marched in the streets or burned books in protest. By the standards of the culture wars, the book wars are distinctly low-key. Indeed, ‘book wars’ might seem like a rather dramatic term for a state of affairs that involves no overt displays of violence, no demonstrations and no shouting in the streets. But the absence of overt displays of violence should not mislead us into thinking that the conflicts are not real or that they don’t really matter. On the contrary, the struggles that have broken out over the last couple of decades in the normally placid world of publishing are very real; they have been fought with a determination and conviction that attests to the fact that, for those involved, these are hugely important struggles that touch on vital interests and in which matters of principle are at stake. At the same time, they are symptoms of the fact that the book industry is undergoing a profound transformation which is disrupting the field, calling into question accepted ways of doing things and thrusting established players into conflict both with new entrants and with old hands who have spotted new opportunities opened up by technological change and seized them, sometimes at the expense of others.

My aim in this book is to examine what actually happened, and what continues to happen, when the digital revolution takes hold in the world of book publishing. Not surprisingly, this is a complicated story with many different players and developments, as established organizations sought to defend and advance their positions while many new players sought to enter the field, or to experiment with new ways of creating and disseminating what we have come to think of as ‘the book’. Given that the world of book publishing is itself immensely complex, consisting of many different worlds with their own players and practices, I have not tried to be comprehensive: I have reduced the complexity and narrowed the scope by focusing on the world of Anglo-American trade publishing – the same world that was the focus of Merchants of Culture. By ‘trade publishing’, I mean that sector of the industry that publishes books, both fiction and nonfiction, that are aimed at general readers and sold through bookstores like Barnes & Noble, Waterstones and other retail outlets, including online booksellers like Amazon. By ‘Anglo-American’ trade publishing, I mean English-language trade publishing that is based in the US and the UK, and for various historical reasons the publishing industries based in the US and the UK have long had a dominant role in the international field of English-language trade publishing. To understand the impact of the digital revolution on other sectors of publishing, such as academic publishing or reference publishing, or on publishing industries operating in other languages and other countries, would require different studies, as the processes and players would not be the same. While my focus here is on the world of Anglo-American trade publishing, I have not restricted myself to the traditional players in this field. The traditional players are important – no question about it. But a key part of the disruption caused by the digital revolution is that it is a shake-up that opens the door for other players to enter the field. These include some of the large tech companies with their own agendas and their own battles to fight, equipped with resources on a scale that dwarfs even the largest of the traditional publishers. But they also include a myriad of small players and enterprising individuals who are located on the margins of the field or in separate spaces altogether, in some cases impinging directly on the publishing field and in other cases subsisting in a parallel universe that connects only indirectly, if at all, with what we might think of as the world of the book.

While some of these new players and their initiatives gain real traction and develop into substantial undertakings, others fizzle out and die – the history of technology is littered with inventions that fail. But when historians come to write the history of technologies and of the companies that develop them, they tend to focus on the successful ones, on the technologies and organizations that, in some sense or some respect, change the world. We read history backwards through the lens of the inventions and companies that succeed. We are fascinated by the Googles and Apples and Facebooks and Amazons of this world – those exceptional ‘unicorns’ that have become so large so quickly that they have assumed an almost mythical status. What gets filtered out of this process are all of those inventions, initiatives and new ideas that seemed like good ideas at the time, maybe even great ideas in which some people passionately believed, but that, for one reason or another, didn’t make it – all those small histories of the great ideas that failed. Maybe the time wasn’t right, maybe the money ran out, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all – whatever the reason, the vast majority of new ventures fail. But the history of the new ventures that failed is often just as revealing as the history of those that succeeded. The failures and false starts tell us a lot about the conditions of success precisely because they underscore what happens when those conditions, or some of those conditions, are absent. And if the vast majority of new ventures end in failure, then an account that focused only on the successes would be very partial at best. Writing the history of technologies by focusing only on the successes would be as one-sided and misleading as writing the history of wars from the perspective of the victors.

Of course, it would be much easier to write the history of the digital revolution in publishing if we had all the advantages of hindsight, if we could transport ourselves forward to the year 2030 or 2040 or 2050, look back at the publishing industry and ask ourselves how it had been changed by the digital revolution. We would have lots of historical data to scrutinize and some of the people who had lived through the transformation would still be around to talk about it. It is much more difficult to write this history when you’re in the middle of it. What can you say about a technological revolution that is still so young, still just beginning to disrupt the traditional practices of an old and well-established industry when, undoubtedly, there is still so much more to come? How can you speak and write with any confidence about a world that is still in the throes of change, where so much is still unsettled and where everyone in the industry is still struggling to make sense of what is happening around them? How, in other words, do you recount a revolution in medias res?

To this question, there is no easy answer, and any account we give will have to be hedged with conditions and qualifications. But at least it is easier to try to give an account of this kind from the vantage point of 2020 than it would have been in 2010 or 2012 or 2015. By 2020, we have had more than a decade of serious ebook sales, so the patterns have had longer to establish themselves and will have achieved a degree of clarity they didn’t have when ebooks were just beginning to take off. Some of the early experiments and more radical projects in digital publishing will have been tried and tested, some will have succeeded and many will have failed, and both the successes and the failures will tell us something about what is viable in this domain and what is not. Moreover, after ten years, the novelty factor will have worn off to some extent and early developments that may have been affected by the attractions of the new may have given way to patterns that reflect more enduring preferences and tastes. All of these are reasons (albeit small) to think that, while a time machine would have made our task much easier, it may not be impossible to say something worthwhile about a transformation that is still under way.

Not only is it difficult to discern what is most important when writing about a process that is still under way, it is also impossible to provide an account that is fully up to date. What I have tried to provide here is not so much a snapshot in time but rather a dynamic portrait of a field in motion, as individuals and organizations within the field struggle to make sense of, adapt to and take advantage of the changes that are taking place around them. To do this properly, you have to home in on some of these individuals and organizations and follow them as they seek to forge a path in the midst of uncertainty, reconstruct the options they faced, the choices they made and the developments that affected them at different points in time. But you can only follow them so far: at some point the story must be cut off and drawn to a close. History is frozen in the act of writing it, and the account you offer will always necessarily refer to a time that precedes the moment when your account is read. As soon as you finish a text, the world moves on and the portrait you have painted is outdated: instant obsolescence is the fate that awaits every chronicler of the present. There is no alternative but to embrace this fate and hope that readers will have a capacious understanding of timeliness.

Most of the research on which this book is based took place between 2013 and 2019, during which time I did more than 180 interviews with senior executives and other staff in a variety of organizations in the US and the UK, mainly in New York, London and Silicon Valley – organizations ranging from the large trade publishers to numerous start-ups, self-publishing organizations and innovative publishing ventures. (A detailed account of my research methods and sources can be found in appendix 2.) When it was helpful and relevant to do so, I also drew on some of the 280 interviews that I had conducted previously for Merchants of Culture. I am very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in New York, which funded the research from 2013 to 2019 (Grant 11300709) and enabled me to spend extended periods of time in the field, and grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK, which funded the earlier research (RES-000-22-1292). I am also very grateful to the many organizations which opened their doors to me, gave me access to their staff and, in some cases, their data; most sources of data are acknowledged in the text, although there are instances where data were provided on condition that the source remains anonymous and, where this is the case, I have scrupulously honoured this commitment. Above all, I am deeply grateful to the many individuals who gave very generously of their time, allowing me to interview them, sometimes repeatedly over several years: I simply could not have written this book without their help. I have quoted directly from only a small proportion of these interviews, and only a fraction of the organizations I studied are used as case studies in the book, but every interview was invaluable in terms of deepening my understanding of a world in flux and the many players who are active, or were active, in it. Most of the individuals I interviewed remain anonymous and I often use pseudonyms when referring both to individuals and to companies. But there are occasions when the real names of interviewees and their companies are used, always with their consent, simply because their stories are so unique that it would be impossible to write about them with any degree of rigour and preserve anonymity. When the real name of an individual is used, the full name is given – first name plus surname – on the first occasion of use. When I use a pseudonym, by contrast, I use an invented first name only – Tom, Sarah, etc. – on the first and subsequent occasions. When I use a pseudonym for a company, I put the pseudonym in inverted commas on the first occasion of use – ‘Everest’, ‘Olympic’, etc. (Again, these conventions and the rationale are explained more fully in appendix 2.)

On those occasions where I quoted from interviews with individuals who are given their real names in the text, I subsequently wrote to these individuals, sent them the text I had written about them and/or their organization, and gave them the opportunity to comment on it: many did so, sometimes in considerable detail, and I took account of their comments in the final version of the text. I am very grateful to these individuals for their willingness to read these texts and provide me with feedback. I am also very grateful to Michael Cader, Angus Phillips and Michael Schudson who read the entire text, and to Jane Friedman and Michele Cobbs who read the chapters dealing with their areas of expertise (self-publishing and audiobooks, respectively): they provided me with many helpful comments and suggestions and saved me from numerous errors and oversights. Any errors that remain are, of course, my own. I am grateful to Leigh Mueller for her meticulous copyediting and to the many people at Polity – including Neil de Cort, Rachel Moore, Evie Deavall, Julia Davies, Clare Ansell, Sue Pope, Sarah Dobson, Breffni O’Connor, Adrienn Jelinek, Clara Ross, Madeline Sharaga, Emma Longstaff, Lydia Davis and Lucas Jones – who steered this book through the publication process. My thanks, finally, to Mirca and Alex, who displayed uncommon patience and understanding over the years when this book was in gestation and who endured a very cold winter in New York while some of the research was being done: this book is for them, small recompense for the many sacrifices they made while it was being written.

J. B. T., Cambridge