Review: Books in the Digital Age, John B. Thompson

John B. Thompson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, has contributed a sociological-, rather than technological-, driven academic study of academic publishing from the perspective of an industry 'outsider'. With the author apparently having no experience within the publishing industry or a technology content organisation/culture, Books in the Digital Age has every strength and every weakness of such a detached, sociological examination of its subject.

Young publishers and non-specialists should not be unduly daunted by this title. From the cover, first impressions are that it could primarily be aimed at information technology specialists or publishing academics. Those members of the SYP working within academic publishing have much to gain from this title; specifically, it is a valuable resource on how textbook publishing programmes in the UK and US, in the early stages of the new millennium, had evolved from the 1980s industry landscape. It also gives an opportunity to learn from interviews with senior executives, within the academic publishing arena, speaking frankly on condition of anonymity. (It is worth mentioning here the rigorous research Thompson undertook from 20002003 is a significant benefit; involving a rigorous series of interviews with senior executives: 'In total, I carried out more than 230 interviews in Britain and the United States, amounting to more than 450 hours of interview material'.)

Readers should not expect a technical analysis to dominate this title. On page 152, Thompson observes '[university presses encouraged authors] ... to write for a wider audience – by broadening the scope of the book, making the the text more accessible stylistically, using a more trade-oriented title, etc'. Books in the Digital Age certainly falls into the latter category, as the sub-title is far more indicative of the content: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, and most of this is not concerned with digitalisation.

The book is divided into four parts, comprising 15 chapters, four of which concentrate on The Digital Revolution. Part I: The Publishing Business proceeds with Chapter 1 covering all bases of the publishing chain, not in especially close detail but The Publishing Cycle and The Publishing Chain sections are sufficient in laying out the process from author to retailer to consumer, for the non-specialist (the more elaborate Figure 1.2 is particularly useful, despite ommitting the indexing stage). This is an opportunity to stress one of the distinct pluses of Books in the Digital Age: the book is liberally illustrated with relevant figures and tables from current research. Thompson goes on from Figure 1.3 to detail how publishers add value: via content acquisition and list-building; financial investment and risk-taking; content development; quality control; management and coordination; and sales and marketing. The Economics of Publishing follows on in fairly brief fashion.

Chapter 2 concerns the assets of publishing firms, namely economic capital; staff; symbolic capital; and intellectual capital. Why each one is important is well covered, and it serves to allow Thompson to introduce a concept which runs throughout this title as a sociological blueprint through which he analyses the industry: publishing 'fields'.

'So what are ... publishing fields? A particular publishing field is a space of positions which are occupied by agents and organizations of various kinds, and these agents and organizations stand in relations of collaboration and/or competition with one another.... The field is the structured social environment in which firms operate and exist, flourish and fail. Each publishing field has its own conditions of success, and therefore its own forms of knowledge...' (p. 37)

These fields are not difficult to comprehend, and as the book progresses this concept is far more apparent to the author than the reader. Thompson then elaborates on three publishing fields -- namely trade, academic and higher education publishing -- to explain this concept further. Thompson discusses linguistic considerations within publishing fields: English being the international language of business; the British Empire and colonial education; and the US as a globally-dominant nation. All worthwhile for putting international markets and foreign language competitors in context.

Part II covers the Field of Academic Pubishing, and Chapter 4 looks at the academic research process; the scale and scope of the leading academic publishers (e.g. OUP being nearly three times the size of CUP; OUP being somewhat decentralized globally and CUP operating more as a single entity in Cambridge; and the differences between these and the major US university presses: Harvard, Princeton and Yale). This chapter progresses to discuss two factors which were to have major repercussions in the academic field: the decline of the scholarly monograph, and the expenditure of libraries in the UK higher education sector.

With three-quarters of the content focussing on the key strategic shifts affecting US and UK academic publishers, focus on electronic content and certain e-book programmes, their initiation and the level of their success, is concentrated in Part IV.

Pasrt IV essentially concludes that the true digital revolution in academic publishing is with digital printing and the electronic workflow; and not the development of ebooks as an alternative, setting a finite future on the printed book. Has the development of, and signiificant investment in, electronic content set the clock ticking on the lifespan of printed academic books? It could be argued that Thompson's conclusion has neatly side-stepped the issue and, after 3 years of research on this subject, is either unwilling or unable to commit to one definitive viewpoint.

In my opinion, Thompson at times seems to run with the hare and the hounds. He stops short of declaring digitalisation failed, but continually emphasises that ebooks never took off as they were expected, devoting over 100 pages to chronicling ebook setbacks. (This is despite detailing the profound seachange in the relationship between academic publishing activity and higher education wrought by electronic delivery.) He does not consider the competing format problems facing technology companies, nor publishers' copyright issues, worthy of inclusion.

The fact is that the vehicle of electronic delivery is continually gathering momentum, and the concluding stance of Books in the Digital Age may have been as premature as those over-optimistic predictions back in the late 1990s. Perhaps this is related to the timeframe this title was researched and written (when the industry was becoming to emerge from the .dotcom boom and bust at the end of the 1990s/start of the deacde). Although this study has been in print for only 4 years, the industry has since witnessed significant progression; and no doubt Thompson experienced shifting sands even as he researched this title. Nevertheless, as a well-researched and intensive academic study of the transition of the UK--US academic publishing scene, for this alone it is a highly rewarding and recommended read.