John B. Thompson: Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century

摘要

Given the proliferation of research about New Media, its exponential growth and dazzling digital advances, the paucity of genuine scholarship about current book publishing practice comes as no surprise. The book industry is comatose by comparison. Why study it? Of course academics continue to mine the history of the early book, retired editors and publishers pen memoirs of publishing’s glory days (in the twentieth century), and regularly the book industry studies itself, but by sector only. One must go back to 1982 to find a comprehensive, research-based analysis of publishing as a whole: Lewis Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter Powell’s Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing. Based on 1970s data, that pioneering study is now woefully outdated.