Reading Books in the Digital Age subsequent to Amazon, Google and the long tail by Terje Hillesund, Associate Professor at the University of Stavanger, Norway. First Monday, volume 12, number 9 (September 2007),
“In the last decades, the book industry has changed and is now characterised by two (or three) opposite tendencies: Many publishing firms are united in large multinational corporations, commercialisation has increased and bookstores are concentrated in large chains, marketing the popular. At the same time, the Internet has come to constitute an immense book market, and recently Google Book Search has demonstrated the power of the Web in book content discovery and display. Search engines and online bookstores disclose and make available books no longer in stock in ordinary bookstore chains; as a result, niche markets flourish and the total sales of obscure books have grown considerably. As a binary underflow, the electronic book slowly seems to be gathering new strength. In this article, I will present literature that analyses current transformations, and I will critically examine John B. Thompsons analysis of the digitalisation of the book as presented in Books in the Digital Age from 2005. Only two years have passed, yet events already confirm my view that Thompson got most of it wrong.”
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