A product warning ahead: whatever the catchy title and the cover art may signal, “Book Wars” is neither a trade book nor does it make for light reading. Indeed, what it actually is, is not all that easy to say. In terms of composition and style, the most recent book by Jesus College emeritus John B. Thompson is a cocktail with one part firm, sociological analysis, one part industry report that could be found in the pages of Publishers Weekly, and one part essayistic sketches of entrepreneurial adventures. “Book Wars” is also the opus magnum that concludes Thompson’s thirty-year long research in media history, serving as a sequel of sorts to his 2010 study of Anglo-American trade publishing with which it shares some source material.1 Yet it is also a deliberately provisional analysis of a fast-moving scene – a snapshot rather than a history benefitting from hindsight.

“Book Wars” covers the tumultuous period between 1995 and 2020 that saw the advent of new technologies, new media, new corporate players, new modes of media reception, and metastasizing (venture) capital markets. These separate, yet closely entangled trends helped combine information technology, computers, and telecommunications in the title-giving revolution. While books have always been transmittable data, stacked in portable, easily stored formats, the speed and scale with which processing and transmission now became possible were new. Moreover, and more crucially, this transformation was accompanied by the generation of user data, initially ancillary to the publishing process but increasingly its true, financially driving force.

With a wealth of knowledge as well as enviable access to interview partners on the higher floors of many of the headquarters he writes about, Thompson delves deep into book publishing statistics. He offers intriguing data, e.g. when he enlists a Silicon Valley insider to outwit Amazon’s notorious refusal to divulge user and subscriber numbers, and presents it in helpful tables and charts. Thompson also draws on a number of sociological concepts borrowed from Walter Ong to Shoshanna Zuboff as well as on recent empirical work.2 The bulk of his book, however, is made up by case studies from various spheres of publishing, each of them rich in personal detail and engagingly written.

The narrative starts with two essentially anti-climactic chapters: one on e-books, the other on experiments with the very form of the book. E-books proved a success, but a surprisingly limited one. Storming the market once reader-friendly devices such as Kindle and various tablets were introduced, their sales exploded from 2008, contributing a fourth of total revenue four years later. But the rise in e-book sales petered out in 2013/14 and declined afterwards. Print’s losses were significant, but its position as the dominant format of marketable books remained unchallenged. Disaggregating data from an anonymized trade publisher, Thompson finds that digital books’ success differed hugely between genres, with (romantic) fiction dominating the field while other types of literature were barely affected by the new format. Similarly, efforts to reinvent the book fell short of expectations. Looking at experimental publishing of small, innovative companies such as Atavist and Touch Press, Thompson acknowledges that the relation between print and digital was seriously rethought, but even some critical and commercial successes amounted to little more than a “false dawn” (p. 101).

In the following chapters hostilities between old and new truly break out, even though the metaphor feels a bit stretched: “backlist wars” (p. 103), “search engine wars” (p. 124), and “new price war[s]” (p. 150) mostly played out in air-conditioned NYC and Silicon Valley offices, with surprisingly little courtroom action. In most instances, managers on both sides avoided the risks of litigation and found other ways to settle their disputes. That does not mean, however, that conflicts were not existential. The Google management’s decision to go on a massive, double-barrelled scanning project that partnered up with research libraries on the one hand (offering free-of-charge digitization) and publishers on the other (free-of-charge publicity) became a major bone of contention. In the framework of American copyright law, this led to a fight over what “fair use” and “snippets” were, but Thompson rightly points out that the differences between publishers and search-machine company were more fundamental. To Google, books were and are high-quality, yet essentially exchangeable content that amplifies traffic; to publishers, content is the fundamental good on which their value creation depends.

If the conflict’s net result was a draw rather than an unequivocal victory for Google, the rise of Amazon put publishers in an even more difficult situation. As with Google, Amazon’s business idea did not result from any intrinsic interest in books; these just happened to be well-suited for online ordering and mailing. Exploiting and developing new digital means, Amazon remade book retailing in its own image, transforming it from a world of physical stores with a variety of both big and small suppliers to one of online orders with a handful of players and one behemoth. Superlatives abound: Amazon is now the “de facto catalogue of record for available books” and its US market share of nigh on 50 per cent of all printed books (and 75 per cent in e-books) makes its ascent a “watershed in the history of the modern publishing history” (p. 141). The juggernaut that Amazon has become benefits from its management’s agility in moving into adjacent markets. Kindle not only boosted the take-off of e-books, it also laid the groundwork for entering self-publishing and subscription services; digital audiobooks pioneer Audible was bought out. Crucially, Amazon perfected the art of personal marketing through recursive algorithms. While the combined might of its horizontal concentration, vertical integration, and product diversification has not given the “everything store” free reign in every respect, notably pricing, Thompson leaves no doubt how utterly dependent publishers have become on the online monopsonist.

If some of the material Thompson covers is well-known, other chapters take the reader to less familiar grounds: by exploring self-publishing, crowdfunded publishing, book subscription services, and social media publishing, a cartography of the vast, varied, and ephemeral world of publishing in the 2000s takes shape. Self-publishing is depicted as “the hidden continent of the publishing world” (p. 259), with limited reliable data on how much content fora such as SmashWords actually offer. It is even possible that the apparent stagnation of e-books is a statistical illusion created by the loss of traditional publishers’ dual position: as gatekeepers to entering the published word and as statistical authorities on that world. Work, too, has spread outside the great houses as publishing services are now often supplied by freelancers, although Thompson does not analyse the implications for labour conditions and social security. These trends are further amplified by the rise of storytelling on social media, with Wattpadd the key exponent. With its 80 million users, many of whom blur the line between author and reader, it dwarves crowdfunded publishing and digital subscription services like Scribd; even Kindle Unlimited with some 4 million customers appears smallish, not least compared to its video equivalent, Prime Video, with about 50 times as many users.3

It is in these limitations of the “digital revolution” that Thompson’s key finding lies. E-books are not everywhere, and “the role of subscription services in the book industry is marginal” (p. 343): so far, books are not going down the same road as music, TV, and cinema. The reasons for this resilience are manifold: publishers learned from their peers in other media industries how (not) to handle digital change; reading books is more deeply inscribed into our communication routines; books were already fairly optimized content containers with relatively little left to improve; and the cultural capital gained from a Kindle isn’t quite the same as that of a hardback.

Unsurprisingly, in a book of such comprehensive ambition, there are major gaps. The most glaring is its nearly exclusive focus on American publishing, with occasional references to the UK and even fewer to other parts of the world. It remains unclear how and with which consequences change occurred in regions with different, less stratified publishing markets. Likewise, the near absence of both authors and readers in the book leaves questions unanswered. Curiously missing – given Thompson’s expertise on academic publishing – is the rise of open access and the utter domination of online reading in journals and, increasingly, book chapters in the academy.

Other question marks concern a tendency in the book to privilege the narratives founders and staff of tech companies tell themselves. Every case study begins with career sketches of entrepreneurs: their acute perception of new demand and gaps in supply, their ideas of offering greater/easier/cheaper access to more customers/users/clients/readers, and the technological solutions they produce. Capital is duly raised, rapid growth is prioritized, and eventually a business model is found that, more often than not, succeeds. Then, enter Amazon. Thompson is well aware of the exceptionality of most of the examples he gives; but the unfortunate decision to reserve much of the analysis to the penultimate chapter, itself a small monograph, makes the image of creative start-up Davids, who nearly always succumb to their Goliath, stick.

In the end, Thompson returns to the piece’s villain, Amazon, with some convincing suggestions of how to curb its exceptional power. Yet, in the framework of his book, it is the areas in which Amazon has failed or disappointed expectations that stand out as the most interesting with an eye to the present of reading and its possible futures. The resilience of the physical medium and its infrastructure appears to be strong, indeed much stronger than expected after half a millennium. But then again, Amazon has only turned 30.

Notes:
1 John B. Thompson, Media and Modernity. A Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge 1995; John B. Thompson, Books in the Digital Age. The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States, Cambridge 2005; John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture. The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge 2010.
2 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Track Changes. A Literary History of Word Processing, Cambridge 2016; Matthew Rubery, The Untold Story of the Talking Book, Cambridge 2016.
3 Clayton Noblit, How Do Kindle Unlimited Subscribers Behave In 2023 (And How Does it Impact Authors)?, 14.09.2023, https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/kindle-unlimited-subscribers/ (26.08.2024).