John B. Thompson - Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States

Table of Contents

CopyrightJohn B. Thompson 2005

The right of John B. Thompson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2005 by Polity Press Ltd.

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All right reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN 0 7456 3477 X

ISBN 0 7456 3478 8 (paperback)

ISBN 9780745684994 (epub)

ISBN 9780745684987 (mobi)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and has been applied for from the Library of Congress.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.polity.co.uk

Figures and tables

Preface

In the late 1990s I became interested in trying to understand the changes that were taking place in an important but hitherto largely neglected sector of the creative industries the book publishing industry. I was struck by the fact that, while books were a pervasive feature of our social and cultural lives (and, for those of us in the academy, an essential part of what we do as teachers and researchers), we knew very little about how this industry is organized today and how it is changing. The digital revolution was fuelling (and continues to fuel) much speculation about the future of the book and, indeed, about whether it has a future at all but there was very little grounded knowledge of what was actually happening in an industry which was, for the most part, taken for granted.

It was against this background that I set out, in the summer of 2000, to try to gain a more systematic understanding of the book publishing industry in the English-speaking world; this book about books is the outcome of the research that preoccupied me for the following three years. I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK for the generous support which made this research possible. I'd also like to thank my colleagues in Cambridge for their willingness to grant me leave for two years so that I could concentrate full-time on the study. My research assistant, Alisi Mekatoa, was very resourceful in gathering data and tracking down relevant materials which have been used in various chapters, and I am grateful to her for her help. I am also grateful to Avril Symonds who transcribed a mountain of tapes with stoic perseverance and good humour; to Ann Bone who copy-edited the manuscript with extraordinary care; and to the many people at Polity including Gill Motley, Sue Pope, Neil de Cort, Andrea Drugan, Emma Longstaff, Reitha Pattison, Breffni O'Connor and Marianne Rutter who helped to steer this book through the publication process. Above all, my thanks go to the many individuals in the publishing industry who gave so willingly and generously of their time and who, over the course of the last few years, have shared with me their knowledge of and views on the industry of which they are part. Some of these individuals also very generously agreed to read an earlier draft of this text and commented extensively on it. In order to protect their anonymity these individuals have remained nameless, but many of the insights and ideas developed in this book belong to them. They deserve much of the credit for what follows, although I alone accept responsibility for any errors that remain.