February 2006    

Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States Author: John B. Thompson Publisher: Polity Press $79.95 Cloth (468 p.) ISBN: 074563477X B&T         YBP $29.95 Paper (468 p.) ISBN: 0745634788 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Bob Nardini, Senior Vice President & Head Bibliographer It's unusual for the book business to itself be the subject of a book, let alone a scholarly book. John B. Thompson is a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge whose early books among the eleven he has written over twenty-five years or so were titles about critical hermeneutics, politics and society, and social theory. Now, following several books on media theory, his more recent focus, he has written the first major study of the book publishing industry in a generation. This industry, as Thompson puts it, is "an enormously complex and varied domain" which can't be thought of as one thing. So he has chosen to concentrate on the two parts most closely connected to higher education--the world he knows best--academic publishing and college textbook publishing, areas far removed from the glamour of high-profile trade publishing, and a pair which rarely get any attention at all. Our own business, then, is the focus of this book. YBP is even mentioned here and there, as a purveyor of approval plans, and one of our staff, Dana Courtney, cited by name for her research on simultaneous paperback and hardcover editions. If monographs had plots, though, it would be everyone who writes, produces, sells, or buys scholarly books that would be principal characters in Thompson's study of industry trends since 1980. His method was to create "intensive" case studies of sixteen US and UK publishing firms, largely through some 230 interviews conducted between 2000 and 2003. At the center of the story for academic publishing was the decline in the market for scholarly monographs. For academic publishers, this has meant forays, with varying degrees of success, into unfamiliar fields of publishing: trade books, textbooks, and regional books. As Thompson puts it, "it is possible to survive as an academic publisher only in so far as you are able and willing to move beyond the field of academic publishing per se." When Thompson began his research, many people thought ebooks were about to utterly transform all areas of book publishing. As we now know, this didn't happen. Thompson refers to the "technological fallacy," the idea "that because the technology exists to do something, consumers will invariably use that technology." This is far from saying, however, that no digital revolution took place. On the contrary, Thompson stresses that the rise of digital workflows and digital content management systems have already transformed academic publishing--by lowering production costs, and so enabling some publishers to survive at all--and show every sign that they will continue doing so. Thompson goes so far, in referring to the possibilities already in view for the licensing of online content and for short-run printing technologies, that the digital revolution, "rather than spelling the demise of the printed book … has given it a new lease of life … indeed, rendering it potentially immortal." The dynamics within college textbook publishing, quite different from those experienced by scholarly publishers, even so caused epochal change in that field, too, over the period of Thompson's study. With well over 400 pages of text, Thompson has written a long and somewhat repetitive book that documents trends about as thoroughly and clearly as anyone could ask in both of these areas. If it turns out we will once more have to wait a generation for the next major study of the publishing business, for the time being at least, we are not in need of one. Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.