TURNING THE PAGE. THE EVOLUTION OF THE BOOK.
By Angus Phillips. Routledge. 139pp. $57.
To say that the world of the book is undergoing change is a cliché. Angus Phillips, in his introduction to Turning the Page, says this is "an exciting period for the book, a time of innovation, experimentation and change ... also a time of considerable fear within the book industry".
Phillips, a director of the Oxford International Centre for Publishing Studies, identifies three fundamental drivers of the book publishing industry: authorship, readership and copyright. While he attempts an international perspective, most of his detail and commentary is British and American based.
Phillips covers in clear, well-documented, chapters: 'The democratisation of authorship'; 'Slow books' (a topic also covered in a different fashion recently by David Mikics in Slow Reading in a Hurried Age, Harvard University Press); 'Content in a digital world'; 'Digital capital'; 'The global book'; and 'Diversity and convergence'. Inevitably, some of his detail has become dated because of the rapidly changing book trade environment, particularly in relation to Amazon, which is pursuing some of the most aggressive tactics in book industry history.
Phillips clearly identifies the big themes, such as do authors need publishers? Some recent bestsellers, such as Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy, certainly didn't before it was picked up by Random House.
Do readers need physical bookshops? Yes and no. The success of the new Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London, with 200,000 titles, proves that you need to know your customers, rather than being part of an anonymous chain with centralised purchasing.
Are the old patterns of content creation and distribution still relevant? What are the patterns of e-book reading? Recent figures indicate that Kindle sales have stalled somewhat to be replaced by tablets. Figures from the UK Publishers Association Digital Sales Monitor for April 2014 revealed a continuing rise in consumer e-book sales, particularly for children's and audiobooks but a significant fall over 2013 percentage rises.
Having identified the major agents of change, Phillips does not envisage "a dramatic tearing-up of the old forms, seeing for example, the vanilla ebook being simply a replication, with advantages, of the printed book". Similarly, he concludes that, "advocates of the book need to stand up and be counted", with, for example, parents reading to their children, books being located in homes and investment in schools and libraries.
The one boom area at the moment for print books is children's literature because parents clearly still wish to read physical books to children where colour illustrations are key attractions. Investment in public libraries has seen a dramatic downturn in England where local council cuts have led to many closures. Physical stock in many public libraries, including Australia, continue to be downsized or weeded to house more terminals and DVD/CD loan collections.
There is evidence that people are reading more than ever, but it's in a variety of formats. How content will be accessed, and from whom, will be crucial issues in the future.
