The publishing value chain has remained relatively consistent since the invention of the printing press. Robert Darnton’s influential model of the communications circuit of the book, which tracks how intellectual property circulated in 18th century France, has been a largely accurate representation of the publishing industry until the late 20th century. This paper examines changes to the publishing industry, particularly as a result of the disruptions and disintermediations of the digital age, and proposes a re-drawing of the communications circuit for the 21st century.
Professor Claire Squires is the Director of the Stirling Centre for International Publishing and Communication at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and an Honorary Professor of Publishing Studies at University College London (UCL). Her publications include Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain, and various articles on literary prizes, children’s publishing, and small nation publishing. She is a past judge for the Saltire Society Literary Awards and a current judge for the Publisher of the Year Award. In 2015, she was a recipient of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. She tweets from @stirpublishing and @clairesquires.
Publishers have always had to be filters. Choosing which books to publish is an integral, indeed defining trait of publishing. This is what separates publishers from a being a medium more widely and lies at the core of my theory of publishing. While it's true that this was always important, in the digital age, and in the age of abundance more widely, this filtering element becomes even more essential. When we have information and content overload, the choices a publisher makes are even more central to their identity. The digital revolution hence means we need to see publishers as selectors, and to understand their place in a wider economy of selection within the world of letters.
Michael Bhaskar is a writer and publisher based in London and Oxford. He is co-founder of Canelo, a new digital publisher, and author of The Content Machine and the forthcoming Curation: The Power of Selection in a World of Too Much. He regularly speaks about the future of business, media, culture and society. He can be found on Twitter @michaelbhaskar.
Inspired by the writings of literary critic and cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams (1921-1988), this talk delves into some of the decisive terms around which book publishing is organized today. It opens with a discussion of “key-words,” a concept that holds particular meaning for Williams. Key-words are neither buzzwords nor important words per se. Instead, they are terms whose shifts of meaning provide unique insight into the changes occurring in specific contexts of cultural practice. The talk then goes on to spotlight four such key-words—book, reading, format, and criticism—and to consider, briefly, what they might tell us about the future of literature in an age of mixed media. The talk concludes by connecting the dots from these literary key-words to my 2009 book, The Late Age of Print, with the aim of challenging and extending some of the volume’s main arguments.
Ted Striphas is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, College of Media, Communication, and Information, at the University of Colorado-Boulder. He is author of The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control (Columbia University Press, 2009) and is currently working on his next book, Algorithmic Culture. Since 2011 he has served as book review editor of the journal Cultural Studies. Twitter: @striphas.
This is an exciting time for the book, a time of innovation, experimentation, and change. The movement to digital has been taking place for some time, so what happens next in the evolution of the book? Authorship is becoming more democratic and there are many more ways for writers to reach an audience. Books can become shorter or longer, and widen their boundaries to incorporate a range of multimedia, becoming truly interactive. If the printing press enabled scalability, so that one book can reach many different readers, today an ebook is even more scalable in that demand can be satisfied straight away almost anywhere in the world. Yet at the same time are we seeing a point of equilibrium between print and digital, where the former’s resilience is starting to become apparent.
Angus Phillips is Head of the School of Arts at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies. He is a leading academic in the area of publishing studies and formerly worked in the industry as a trade editor at Oxford University Press. He is the author and editor of a number of books most recently Turning the Page (2014) and Inside Book Publishing (fifth edition 2014, with Giles Clark), both published by Routledge.
