John Thompson and the Ongoing Digital Revolution in Publishing

By Nancy K. Herther (Writer, Consultant and former Librarian with the University of Minnesota Libraries) <herther@umn.edu>

Sociologist John Brookshire Thompson is a professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College. An award-winning researcher and teacher, his recent focus is on impact of the digital revolution on social and political life, social organization of the media industries and the changing structure of the book publishing industry. His recent research, focusing on reading in modern culture, include Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); the Second edition,2012; and Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing (Cambridge: Polity, 2021). The global reach of his influence is clearly apparent in that his works have been translated into many languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek and Russian. Please Note: This interview was conducted in July 2022 via the Internet.

NKH: Your research and works have laid bare the reality that the foundation on which the book publishing industry has been based for 500 years — the printed page — is now facing critical challenges in the form of eBooks, BookTok and other new technology applications. New players arose, many coming from technology or Internet services. Your book title says it well, we are in the midst of the “book wars.”

In your earlier 2010 book, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, you provided an excellent overview of these turbulent times for book publishing. After five decades of comparative calm, today’s combination of both and technological change is changing the industry. Your book’s jacket calling this “the first major study of trade publishing for more than thirty years,” providing “fascinating insight into the high-risk culture on both sides of the Atlantic.” The title “merchants of culture” is interesting and I think explains the way in which so many in the publishing industry see their role — as a cultural institution rather than a publishing business.

The last ten years in particular have been rough ones due to global economic challenges, enormous technological changes to publishing itself, the contraction of the industry into fewer major publishers as well as the continuing role of smaller, independent presses. The pressures on publishers have been enormous, yet for most agents I’ve been speaking with, there is more a sense of needing a course change rather than something far more potentially catastrophic. Is this more bravado or, for at least the “big five or four” commercial presses, there is still solid ground.

How concerned are you about the current state of publishing today — as an industry? What do you see for commercial presses in the next five or ten years?

JT: I’ve been studying the book publishing industry intensively for more than 20 years and throughout this time period, I’ve heard many people predict that the industry was facing its Armageddon. They looked over their shoulders at what was happening in the music industry and they thought: this is our future too. But I’ve always been of the view that, when it comes to thinking through the implications of the digital revolution for the media industries, it is dangerous and misleading to extrapolate from one industry, or even one sector of an industry, to another.

Each industry and each sector has specific conditions that shape the ways that the digital transformation occurs within that industry and sector. The world of Anglo-American trade publishing remains more vibrant and robust than many people thought it would be 10 or 20 years ago: sales and revenues have not collapsed, and digitization has enabled firms to take some costs out of the supply chain, improving their profitability. But the industry faces huge challenges — not least because the retail sector has become far more concentrated than it was a few decades ago, with one tech giant, Amazon, accounting for a high proportion of publishers’ sales. Moreover, thanks to the digital revolution, the information environment within which publishing exists is changing in profound ways, and people are getting more information online.

Publishers need to think creatively about how they can remain relevant in this changing environment, and how the cultural form that they produce — books — can continue to be made relevant to people’s lives. Unlike some prophets of doom, I do think books and publishers have a future in what will, in all likelihood, be a mixed economy of print and digital, where printed books, eBooks and audiobooks co-exist sideby-side. But there are no grounds for complacency: our world is changing fast and publishers must constantly re-invent themselves if they want to remain relevant to the cultural, social and political conversations of our times.

NKH: eBooks are certainly a major technological change that is creating potential for new models of publishing. University, library and other publishing ventures have arisen as options to more traditional scholarly publishing from the academy. Libraries across the U.S. and beyond have developed collaborative and independent presses that are growing in popularity and acceptance for both commercial and scholarly titles. The latest version of the Library Publishing Directory now covers the formal publishing activities of 145 academic and research libraries, not only in North America but across the globe. How do you see the impact and role of these various inhouse efforts of research institutions themselves?

JT: As I argue in Book Wars, the focus on eBooks per se is an overly narrow way to think about the impact of the digital revolution on the book publishing industry: eBooks are important, but they are only one aspect of a much broader and more complicated series of changes that are transforming the publishing world. Among other things, the digital revolution has made it much easier and cheaper to make symbolic content, including extended texts, available for others to access and read, and this has blurred the boundaries of publishing fields and given rise to new spheres of activity that have taken on a life of their own.

With regard to the field of Anglo-American trade publishing, which is the focus of Book Wars, these new spheres of activity include the rapidly expanding world of self-publishing as well as the rich and varied world of online storytelling: these worlds are themselves immensely complex, like parallel universes that exist alongside the world of traditional publishing, sometimes overlapping with it but, for the most part, developing according to their own dynamics.

The world to which you’re calling attention here — the publishing activities of academic and research libraries as documented by the Library Publishing Directory — is another world of this kind, in this case existing alongside what I call the field of academic publishing (a field that I analysed in my earlier book, Books in the Digital Age). I would see these activities as a welcome development, complementary to the publishing activities of the university presses and other academic publishers. They are making available various kinds of scholarly content — including journals, monographs, conference papers and proceedings, dissertations, research reports, data sets and educational materials of various kinds — that university presses and other commercial academic publishers might be reluctant or unable to publish.

Scholars and students can only benefit from the fact that this content is being made available, usually as open access, by library-based publishing initiatives, and since it would probably be difficult for university presses and other academic publishers to publish most of this material in commercially viable ways, these initiatives are probably best seen as complementary to the work of the university presses and other academic publishers rather than in direct competition with them.

NKH: In your Book Wars, it is clear that you still see great value in the “print-on-paper book” as a “remarkably resilient cultural form.” Still the growth in new players — independent sources, nonprofits, Amazon and so on — are showing strong growth and often online and not in print. The power of the Internet itself as a finding tool is key, it would seem, to allowing these new players to find audiences and develop new types of publishing products. And, the Internet itself has become a source for finding information/entertainment broadly even beyond the printed page.

There is also the growth of social media and alternative ways to share stories, and ideas. BookTok is one key example that is clearly impacting the book trade, and shows the potential for a whole new type of publicity/recommendation: The influencer. How do you see this evolving system of not just publication but it finding/identifying “books” of interest to today’s younger audiences?

JT: This is a key point: the ways in which people find out about books, or “discover” them, are changing today in fundamental ways. The traditional methods of bringing books to the attention of readers — displaying them in bookstores, placing ads and getting reviews in mainstream media, getting authors talking about their books on radio and TV, etc. — have not disappeared and remain important, but they are being increasingly supplemented by, and in some respects displaced by, other ways of making books visible to potential readers via an array of digtital tools and platforms, from email to social media.

I analyse a variety of these digital tools and platforms in Book Wars; there are many and they’re constantly changing. The relevance of each form and platform varies from one book and category of book to another: what is relevant and effective for scholarly nonfiction books will be very different from what is relevant and effective for fiction aimed at young adults, for example. I think we should expect to see these tools and platforms continue to evolve in the coming years, as individuals and entrepreneurs experiment with new media and use platforms in innovative ways to talk about books and engage with readers and writers.

The challenge for publishers is to try to keep up with these developments, which change very quickly, and to find creative ways of embedding books into the cultural conversations that are increasingly taking place online.

NKH: In your book, you describe today’s situation for the book publishing industry as facing “its greatest challenge since Gutenberg.” In your 200+ interviews with key publishing executives and others in the industry for your book Merchants of Culture (2010), how do they see their evolving role and the state of book publishers?

JT: There is not a single view that would sum up how senior publishing executives see their evolving role in the changing ecology of book publishing: you will hear many different views depending on who you talk to and when you talk to them. I interviewed many of the senior figures in Anglo-American trade publishing for Book Wars and Merchants of Culture over a period of some 15 years, and I weave their views into the account of the transformation of the industry that I offer in these books: my account is deeply informed by the 180+ interviews I did for Book Wars and the 280+ interviews I did for Merchants of Culture

I won’t try to summarize these views here. But let me just highlight one view, expressed by the CEO of a large trade house, that resonated with the views of others and had a strong impact on my way of thinking about the impact of the digital revolution. He expressed the view that the essence of the digital transformation in the publishing industry is not really the rise of the eBook — that is important but nowhere near as important as many people thought and feared in the early 2000s; rather, the essence of the digital transformation is that it has forced publishers to take readers more seriously and to become more reader-centric in their way of thinking about their role as publishers, and at the same time it provided them with the tools to do this at scale.

This CEO’s organization, and many other publishing houses, are working hard to restructure their businesses so that they are oriented not just to authors and retailers but to readers too, whether this is by building databases of information about the individuals who are interested in their books — what I call “information capital” — or by becoming more active on social media platforms and other spaces where readers hang out. Given that for most of the history of the book business, publishers thought of themselves primarily as B2B businesses, selling books to bookstores and other retailers and leaving them to deal with consumers, this is a fundamental change in the mind-set of publishers.

NKH: In interviews I’ve done with independent authors, some who have chosen to publish with Amazon or other newer outlets, they see the newer Internet-based finding and publishing options better equipped to reach readers with traditional gatekeepers and have described their choices as a more open effort toward “democratization of culture.”

JT: There are many indie authors who are strongly committed to the ethos of self-publishing and would not choose to publish now in any other way: they like the control that it gives them as well as the significantly higher royalty share. Self-publishing suits them and they see themselves as part of a broader cultural movement in which individuals reclaim for themselves the tools to publish their own work and make it available for others to read. But this is not true of all indie authors: there are also many authors who end up self-publishing their books because they don’t have other options. They may have tried to find a traditional publisher but were unsuccessful, and they ended up self-publishing because it was the only realistic option left to them.

There are other authors who choose to publish in both ways, depending on what they are publishing: for example, one author I interviewed was an academic and she publishes her academic books with a good university press, but she has another persona as a thriller writer and she self-publishes her thrillers under a pseudonym: this dual arrangement works very well for her. Self-publishing platforms open up new pathways to publication, and different individuals avail themselves of these pathways for different reasons at different stages of their lives and careers. For some it is a strong commitment to a set of values they passionately believe in, for others it is a pragmatic solution to a problem they face at a particular point in time.

The rapid growth of self-publishing since the early 2000s has led many to speculate that traditional publishers would be “disintermediated” as authors would migrate to self-publishing platforms, but in practice it hasn’t worked out like that. The migration has been both ways: some authors have migrated to self-publishing, but some indie authors have also been happy to be published by mainstream publishers when the opportunity arose.

In Book Wars, I use the example of Andy Weir’s book The Martian, which began life as a blog on Andy’s website and was then self-published by him as a Kindle on Amazon, and then it was snapped up by Random House who turned it into an international bestseller, but there are many other examples of this kind of cross-over from self-publishing to mainstream publishing. What’s happened in practice is that these two worlds, traditional publishing and self-publishing, have developed alongside one another, like two parallel universes, and authors move back and forth depending on what they want to achieve and the options available to them at different points of time.

And it’s important to remember that while self-publishing works well for some authors, especially those who have built up a significant following of readers, it works less well for many others, who find it difficult and costly to try to market and sell their books. Uploading the book and “publishing” it on a selfpublishing platform is the easy bit; it’s much harder to get anyone to notice that your book is published, let alone to buy it and read it. In the world of self-publishing, the task of getting your book noticed, making it visible, falls heavily on the author, and many indie authors find that the book into which they’ve poured their heart and soul remains largely invisible when it is finally launched into the world.

The rise of self-publishing has created new pathways to publication for authors and has altered the traditional power structures of the publishing world, but we shouldn’t romanticize the world of self-publishing: for most indie authors, getting your book noticed is a huge challenge, and the vast majority of self-published books sell in tiny numbers.

NKH: Another interesting feature of all of this is the selfpublishing opportunities and services, crowdfunding from sites such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and social media platforms such as Wattpad, where “readers and writers interact around the shared activity of writing and reading stories,” have opened up new access points for authors.

JT: This is more a comment than a question — and I agree with the comment.

NKH: Amazon opened some brick-and-mortar stores in the U.S. — including two here in Minnesota where I live. They were busy stores….until Amazon rather quickly shuttered their brick-and-mortar stores in North America….without much notice or explanation. Was this another experiment or did they consider this a failure? What lessons did they learn in this very limited endeavor? Or was it potentially more of an effort to test the waters, before deciding it wasn’t the direction they wanted to take on?

JT: For Amazon, opening physical bookstores was always viewed as a retail experiment. They wanted to use physical bookstores as a way to test certain retail ideas, like checkoutfree shopping and algorithm-driven displays, to showcase new technology products and to recruit more customers to Amazon Prime; selling books was important but it was never the only, or perhaps even the most important, part of the physical bookstore experiment.

However, with the acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Amazon acquired more than 430 physical stores in prime locations where it could experiment with and flesh out its retail methods and ideas on a much larger scale. There was no longer any need for Amazon to open and run an array of boutique physical bookstores in expensive inner-city locations: it could shift its retail experimentation to its Whole Foods stores and its Go convenience stores. I wouldn’t see this so much as a failure but rather as a retail experiment that ran its course and was eclipsed by the decision to acquire Whole Foods, which enabled Amazon to move its retail experimentation into the much larger retail space of food and groceries.

NKH: My last question: What should a “book” be in the 21st century? Created in other ways, integrating audio, video, and other technological experiments? T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land — which allowed people to listen to the story being read, watch it performed, with rich experience and background info failed in the marketplace. In the early days of CD-ROM, these types of multimedia products were created as well, yet they never really succeeded beyond the life of the CD-ROM format. Perhaps the companies weren’t able to sustain needed growth or perhaps the audience just wasn’t there due to all of the freely available multimedia types of storytelling available on the web freely. What are your thoughts?

JT: As part of the digital revolution in publishing, there has been a great deal of experimentation with the “form” of the book, using digital technologies to try to create new kinds of books in digital media that are no longer constrained by the physical properties of the print-on-paper book. From digital shorts and books-as-apps to online storytelling, a great deal of effort and ingenuity has been invested in these creative endeavours — I devote a couple of chapters of Book Wars to exploring these initiatives.

Some of these initiatives resulted in some exceptionally attractive multi-media products which could only be realized on a screen — The Waste Land app, developed by Touch Press, is a very good example of this kind of creativity. By exploiting the new medium of the app and the technical affordances of the iPad to the full, Touch Press and other organizations were able to breathe new life into texts that had previously existed only on the printed page and were able to create entirely new works that stretched the boundaries of what we have come to think of as “the book.”

But I also show that the act of creation was only part of the story: it is one thing to create new kinds of “books,” it is quite another to do this in a way that is sustainable over time, and if you can’t do this in a sustainable way, then the form will die. This is exactly what happened to most of the new ventures that set out to use digital technologies to re-invent the book: the excitement of creating something new soon gave way to the harsh realities of the marketplace, and many of the organizations that had been set up to pioneer new forms of the book ran out of cash and were closed down. It turned out to be a false dawn.

To the surprise of many people, the digital revolution has not swept away or dissolved the traditional form of the book, understood as a way of organizing textual content in accordance with certain norms and conventions, even if it has separated this form from a particular medium: it is no longer necessary to embed this form in a print-on-paper book, as the same content can now be delivered to the reader as a digital file or eBook. In my terminology, the eBook is not a new form of the book but rather another format — that is, another way of packaging the book and making it available to readers. The content of the eBook and the printed book is essentially the same, even if the format and the medium of delivery are different. The eBook revolution, such as it was, was much less radical than many people thought it would be.

Looking forward, I suspect that what we’re likely to see in the book publishing sphere is what I would call co-existent cultures of print and digital: the form of the book will not change greatly, but books will be part of a hybrid culture where print and digital co-exist side by side, a culture in which the traditional printed book continues to play an important role in the lives of many people but where eBooks are also a common form of content delivery, especially for certain categories of books like romance and other categories of genre fiction; a culture, moreover, where new worlds are constantly proliferating online, creating spaces where people can create and consume textual and other forms of content digitally, in some cases freely and in other cases at a cost, sometimes in conjunction with the printed word but in many cases without any connection to print, whether to the printed book or to other forms of print culture.

These worlds will continue to exist side by side and to crisscross and overlap in multiple ways, without the proliferation of online spaces leading to the demise of the book as we’ve known it or of the industry that has, for some five hundred years, cultivated the skills, expertise and talent needed to publish books well.