There are three stages in the technological history of the modern book industry as a scalable and mass production of books. The main attention is paid to the history of digital books, the beginning of which is associated not so much with the beginning of digital book production, but with the advent of digital distribution. On the technical side, this meant developing common industry standards for the digital book, building a distribution infrastructure based on the Internet, and gaining broadband access to it for the mass consumer. Equally significant were the cultural shifts that accompanied or resulted from this technical transformation. The digitalization of the book itself did not have a significant impact on the industry before the ubiquity of the Internet, since the sphere of existence of digital books was limited to a small number of qualified users. Everything changed in the first two decades of the 21st century, when the laws of the “attention economy” came into force and the mechanism of competition for the user’s time by content was activated. A digital book, on the one hand, is becoming more accessible; on the other hand, the time spent on reading books is being reduced. The development of computer technologies and the Internet, in addition to removing the barrier to access to content, removes a significant number of barriers to content publication. It is important to note that the publishing filter in the context of open publication also ceases to work in legal terms, and its disappearance led, in particular, to the emergence and rapid growth of fan fiction literature, which is in the “gray” zone of copyright. The spread of the Internet, of course, creates not only problems, but also opportunities for publishers, in particular, by changing communication with readers. The Internet has made possible not only direct communication with the reader and reader communities, but also a much more effective prompt response to readers’ requests, including those supported by compelling economic incentives. The changes that are taking place in the book industry at the third stage of technological transformation have a very heterogeneous effect on publishers in different countries, depending on the degree of market development, Internet penetration, and readers’ digital content habits. The main point is that these changes take place in very different ways in different types of book publishing. Obviously, “book”, whatever its definition one gives, is just a convenient collective format for completely different texts, materialized or embodied in digital form in different ways. At the same time, the functional purpose of the text and the way the reader treats it determine the trajectory along which the industrial niche corresponding to certain types of publications will develop, in which direction it will evolve.
Print and the Reformation: A Drama in Three Acts
