Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson
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is simply perfect at summing up how the whole messy business works and explaining why it very frequently doesn’t work.’
Andrew Crofts, author of The Freelance Writer’s Handbook
‘A must-read for anyone interested in books and the publishing industry, this is an easy-to-understand, fascinating account of the history of the publishing industry in the UK and US and a coherent explanation for the current pressures facing the main players … A fascinating book and one that I would heartily recommend.’
Caroline Hooton, writer and blogger for Quippe’s Journal
‘By an order of magnitude, this is the best book on the economics of contemporary publishing.’
Tyler Cowen, George Mason University and blogger for The Marginal Revolution
‘Fascinating … a tremendous primer into the political economy of the publishing industry. Highly recommended.’
Displacement Activity
‘A must-read for any writer trying to get a handle on what the future portends.’
Erik Olsen, wewantedtobewriters.com
‘Anyone who is interested in our shared cultural well-being ignores the implications of [Thompson’s] work at their peril.’
Ben Bennetts, Things Unrespected
‘A compelling and necessary new book.’
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
‘Merchants of Culture is crisp and clear, and does a great job in both describing and understanding changes in this strange business … Thompson’s study is one of the most valuable studies on publishing in recent decades, and promises to be the new reference point for sociological research on the publishing industry.’
Cultural Sociology
‘The richness of Thompson’s analysis … his fascinating ethnographical descriptions and … the remarkable clarity of his demonstration … shows the benefit that economic sociology could derive from the study of cultural industries.’
Economic Sociology
‘[This] book updates the documentary record for sociologists and will rivet any wannabe author … Even though corporations like Borders file for bankruptcy, the book will survive, and Thompson describes the conditions, some menacing but others safeguarding its always-uncertain future.’
American Journal of Sociology
‘Thompson’s study of book selling makes compelling and sometimes troubling reading.’
Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly
‘For anyone seeking to understand the industry, I know of no better resource. Merchants of Culture deserves to become an established text on publisher education courses.’
British Journal of Educational Studies
‘Thompson has written a very valuable book that is likely to become the standard reference on the Anglo-American publishing industry for many years to come.’
Mediekultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research
MERCHANTS OF CULTURE
THE PUBLISHING BUSINESS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Second Edition
JOHN B. THOMPSON
polity
Copyright © John B. Thompson
The right of John B. Thompson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First Edition published in 2010 by Polity Press
Second Edition first published in 2012 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
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Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6361-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6106-3 (paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6142-1 (Multi-user ebook)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6143-8 (Single-user ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
Writing about a present-day industry is always going to be like shooting at a moving target: no sooner have you finished the text than your subject matter has changed – things happen, events move on and the industry you had captured at a particular point in time now looks slightly different. Immediate obsolescence is the fate that awaits every chronicler of the present. There is no remedy apart from revising and updating the text if and when the opportunity presents itself, though even then you will always remain a step behind the flow of events, freezing a world at the very moment that it slips away from you.
Thirty or forty years ago, the risks of obsolescence would not have seemed so great to someone writing about the book publishing industry: sure, the industry was changing in important ways, but the basic principles and practices that characterized the industry were not being called into question. Publishing houses were being bought up by large corporations, retail chains and literary agents were becoming more powerful and the traditional world of trade publishing was being transformed into a big business. But the book itself as a cultural object – that unique combination of print and paper, the fusing together of the written word and the material artefact – was being produced in much the same way as it had been for centuries. Today that is no longer so. As we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century the oldest of the media industries finds itself in the throes of tumultuous change, struggling to cope with the impact of a technological revolution that is stripping away some of the old certainties, undermining traditional models and opening up new possibilities in ways that are at once exciting and disorientating. What once seemed like a quiet backwater of the media industries has suddenly become news.
In preparing the text for the paperback edition I have concentrated on ensuring that the book takes account of significant new developments and that empirical data are updated where it is important to do so. There are many contexts where data from 2008 or 2009 continue to provide a good picture of how the industry looks today, and I have therefore left the figures as they were. But there