Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015

The book trade is going through wide-ranging changes pushed by digital technology and e-books, and there is considerable concern over the consequences this will have for literature, culture and reading. The article proposes that the present development can be compared with similar changes in the book trade in the past, and that the effects of sales of e-books might not be all-encompassing as has been feared. A comparison between sales in the Swedish book clubs in the 1970s and the Internet bookshops in the 1990s, offers a range of similarities and differences. These are then related to the e-book sales since 2010. While the e-book might be a disruptive technology, put in a historical perspective and in a Swedish context, it appears less radical and the impact not as far-reaching as has been predicted. The comparison with book clubs and Internet sales gives an indication of the structural changes to be expected and what aspects are fundamental and new.

We report on research in progress on the e-book phenomenon in Sweden, the aim of which is to explore the impact of the e-book at every stage, from authorship, through publishing, library lending and bookselling to readership. Here two aspects of the research are covered, the attitudes of authors and publishers towards e-books, to demonstrate the ‘early adoption’ stage of the e-book in the Swedish market. Interviews with authors reveal that most regard e-books favourably, although most of those who have a contract with publishers see it as a by-product of print publishing. Most authors do not have much experience in e-book publishing or self-publishing. The survey of publishers reveals ambivalence towards e-books and in their relationships with libraries and booksellers. The main ‘drivers’ in the uptake of e-books are consumers’ demands for portable, convenient formats and the search for more economic solutions to the provision of textbooks.

This article aims to analyse current transformations in the Danish book publishing industry in light of the convergence between the book and the broader media culture. We focus on changing relationships between actors (publishing houses, bookstores, etc.) in the trade book’s circuit of production, distribution and consumption. The development of the e-book challenges established routines of publishers, which must cope with new groups of actors in both the production and distribution of their products as well as new ways for readers to access and consume books. Methodologically, the study is based on qualitative interviews with key organizational actors in the Danish publishing industry and document studies of available industry information and statistics. On a theoretical level, the project combines organizational theory and institutional perspectives of mediatization in order to address the question of how the introduction of new media reconfigures old media industries. In particular, we focus on the interplay between book business actors’ perceptions of digital technology, the changing market conditions, and the possibilities this entails for them.

The convergence between the book and other media is enabled by ‘institutional entrepreneurs’, who import perceptions and practices from other media industries into book publishing. These changes at the organizational level also affect the balance between ‘market’ and ‘cathedral’ in the book publishing industry as a whole. The distinction between ‘brownfield’ and ‘greenfield’ development allows us to understand why existing players in the book market generally try to adapt to digital technologies in ways that do not put their existing businesses at risk, while newcomers may face fewer barriers to pursuing new technological opportunities.

Since Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gower’s public boycott of Elsevier kicked off the so-called ‘academic spring’ in 2012, activist calls for open access academic publishing and the expansion of the scholarly knowledge commons through new digital technologies have only intensified. These have had direct, dramatic and fast-evolving impacts upon governmental policy, as well as debates about the public value of research, in the United Kingdom. However, the bulk of the attention in this context thus far has been given to journal articles and academic publishing companies like Elsevier that specialize in periodicals. Comparatively little attention has been given to the effects of these open access policies and discourses upon academic books and their publishers, even though the largest university press in the world, Oxford University Press, and the largest higher education textbook publisher, Pearson, are both UK based. This article, therefore, will explore how, precisely, the open access movement in the United Kingdom is affecting academic book publishing, with potentially global consequences. I begin by tracing the contemporary origins of open access back to open source software initiatives and exploring their recent impact upon Research Councils UK (RCUK) and Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) policies. Then, I look at open access initiatives and other strategies in response to shifts in policy and public discourse within the two overlapping yet distinct fields of academic book publishing, (1) scholarly book publishing and (2) higher education textbook publishing, and find unintended consequences potentially resulting in less openness and equitable access to knowledge production and consumption. Ultimately, I will contend, the open access movement in the United Kingdom risks further concentrating control of academic book publishing within a few powerful institutions, such as well-endowed elite universities and those businesses whose profits rely upon managing, manipulating and repackaging the information freely available in the digital age.

While the transformation of the traditionally print-based book industries to digital and multi-format publishing industries is the subject of much debate, the audiobook industry has largely escaped attention. In a sense, this is curious, given the fact that audiobook publishers have been at the forefront of the technological transformation of the book industry from reel-to-reel tapes and long-playing records all the way into the digital era. All the while, audiobook publishing has never been entirely integrated into the publishing world at large and has somewhat remained an outsider industry, often seen to cater for niche markets. In this article I argue that traditional book publishers venturing into digital publishing can learn from successes and failures in the history of audiobook innovations. Basing the discussion in theories of cultural production and innovation, the article explores the interplay between technology and publishing strategy by way of analysing audiobook technologies from 1980 to 2012 in light of industry and technology developments in the book industry in general, with specific attention to the Norwegian audiobook market, where four case studies of publishers and service providers are analysed. The central issue in the article is how and to what extent the development of audiobook publishing technologies is indicative of technology development in the book industries in general.

Digitalization has changed the preconditions for most media in recent decades, offering a rare opportunity to develop and change traditional media and the media market. The book medium is no exception. What is to be considered a book is being challenged, or, for some, threatened. As the e-book market grows there is, as with other media, still ambiguity in the direction of the development and the normalization of the e-book concept. This article discusses the extent to which physical form, genre and utilization are important when defining the book medium in the late age of print, contributing to the debate regarding the future of the book. The article is based on interviews with four prominent scholars in the research area of the digitization of text media. The findings show that, despite good arguments for how the e-book should be defined, its definition is highly context-dependent. However, as the e-book moves towards more enhanced digital versions and away from digitized ones, genre will grow increasingly important for the definition of a ‘book’ in the digital environment. This means that, in moving towards a more converging understanding of the future of the book, its definitions will diverge.

Traditionally, the printed book has been the preferred mode of delivery for literature, to such an extent that the book’s status as a medium has been practically invisible. However, recent studies have demonstrated that the mediality of the book affects the way we read. The interpretation of literature is not just a matter of scrutinizing the text itself but of analysing the complex interplay between form, content and medium. In 2012 Jennifer Egan published the story ‘Black Box’ via Twitter. The story has subsequently been published in various other media, such as magazines, printed books and as an audiobook. This multimodal publication history necessitates new analytical strategies that can investigate what happens to our notions of a literary work when the literary text appears in several media at once. Taking off from an analysis of ‘Black Box’ and its various embodiments and drawing on John Bryant’s concept of ‘the fluid text’ the article discusses what happens to the literary work when it is dispersed between various media.

The rise of digital media and technology has game-changing effects on literature and publishing. Among other things, our contemporary period is seeing a remarkable increase in the marketing activities surrounding literature, authors and publishers in which digital media platforms play a significant role. As a result we have witnessed a proliferation of digital as well as print texts in general – and of new digital text formats and labels in particular. A distinct aspect of the new digital formats is that the texts are often ascribed to other texts while at the same time being presented to the world as separate entities. But what status should we assign to these texts that are at the same time detached from and attached to other texts? Should they be regarded as texts in their own right, as paratext or merely as products of marketing? Based on an analysis of the McSweeney’s iOS app, this article will suggest that Jacques Derrida’s idea of the frame (e.g. the frame of a painting) as a parergon can be applied to the digital excerpt of a novel and other varieties of so-called ‘extra material’ in order to identify the function of these particular proliferating texts as something in between artworks in their own right and products of marketing.

Building on a preliminary case study of the Danish educational publisher Systime A/S and its flagship product, the web-based ‘iBog’/‘iBook’, this article explores how digital textbooks can be understood as design. The shaping of digital books is seen as being intertwined in a wider circuit of design culture, constituted by changes in designer roles, consumption and mediation practices and restructuring of book production. Following this perspective entails an investigation not only into the shaping of the book as an isolated artefact or product but also into how business models, internal reorganization of the publishing company, web-based user interfaces, and ultimately the branding, which market these new digital objects, are building powerful discourses around the product. Thus it is suggested that the design process of the iBog case can be understood in a model of database-based publishing with multiple levels. In the final analysis, the iBog is much more than a product and a technology. It is a brand that goes beyond what can be studied by looking at the digital textbook as a singular artefact.