Curation in Publishing

Editorial departments are critical components of a publishing house. Their core function is curation of the lists: that is commissioning and choosing which books (or content) are to be published by a given publisher. The idea of the curatorial paradigm is introduced to explain this concept. The curatorial paradigm is the set of explicit and implicit guidelines and philosophies by which a publisher selects works. It is both produced by the editors themselves and is also felt as pressure by those editors; it is circumscribed at its widest extent by the permissible set of curatorial paradigms within a society. One of the key factors about such paradigms are their frequently contradictory nature: publishers can, from the outside, have highly divergent lists and yet this will be supported internally by a clear curatorial paradigm. To understand what publishers do, then, we must understand how such paradigms operate.

Bookselling

Booksellers have always been vital to the publishing mix, making or breaking books’ success, but bookselling is now very much in transition. Coming from a stable system of wholesale and retail, we have seen the rise of chain bookstores, followed by the creation of the world’s largest and most powerful bookshop—Amazon.com. Entirely new business models for all book formats have emerged in the last decade, as well as new products and services consisting of books and related media. Bookselling remains in many countries a highly regulated business, but will see further change due to dependencies between the different book business models, technological innovation, the continuing competition with related industries, and a changing demographics of book buyers.

Rights

The trade in subsidiary rights can be of significant importance to the publishing process, with rights sales providing vital additional revenue for authors and publishers alike; in many cases, potential rights sales can influence the overall publishing decision. The acquisition of rights can extend the range of a commissioned list. This chapter sets out to examine the importance of securing a suitable rights ‘package’ from the author (or via the author’s agent) in order to maximize the exploitation of intellectual property rights through the active exploitation of appropriate rights categories such as same-language territorial rights, translation rights, serial rights, audio rights, dramatization rights, and electronic rights. In addition, it touches on areas of rights which are reactive (the granting of permissions) or in effect contracted out (collective secondary licensing via a mandate to the national Collective Management Organization). It also covers key issues on the acquisition of rights.

Educational Publishing

In the first part of this chapter, we will briefly outline the main characteristics of educational publishing that are common in the majority of developed and developing countries. In the second part, we will demonstrate how, in different countries, some of these common characteristics have been modified in accordance with different prevalent values as well as different educational systems. We will also discuss how digitization has changed educational publishing and why ‘the logic of the classroom’ has led to the digitization of educational materials moving slower than expected by digital pundits. We will examine how these changes have affected trade publishing as well as how the skills and competencies of educational publishers differ from the skills and competencies inherent in trade publishing.

Academic Publishing

This chapter on academic publishing covers the origins of the field; the impact of the two major drivers of change—the printing press and the Internet—on the spread of knowledge; Open Access; the monograph; university presses; academic libraries; commercial academic publishers; trade publishers and the cross-over book; peer review; journals; HE textbook publishing. It looks at all these areas through the lens of change, stressing the need for greater connectivity between the various communities of practice involved in the academic publishing field, and underlines the historic and existing collaborative and innovative strengths it contains.

Publishing and Information

This chapter addresses some of the conceptual challenges with speaking about publishing and ‘information’ that range from the underlying philosophical distinctions between the various terms through to practical mutations in the non-fiction/scholarly publishing spaces and the growing demands to publish new types of data objects and software. The chapter argues that the true challenges for publishing and information in the era of the Internet and World Wide Web pertain to frames of cultural authority and truth but also to labour scarcity in publishing in a digital world that presents itself as infinitely abundant. This argument is structured across a first section on what we mean by ‘information’, a second on the history of digital reproduction as it emerged in the twentieth century, a third on the challenges for labour and authority in information publishing, and finally a set of case studies and practical observations on preprints, replication studies, and data.

Globalization and Publishing

This chapter demonstrates how different global value surveys have confirmed what any observant and educated global traveller knows—that even in similarly developed countries, people have different values and tastes and, consequently, they read different books. Further, the chapter explains how the global spread of printing technology and market forces have produced similar results in all book markets worldwide. First, the number of published titles is rapidly increasing. Second, the number of bestsellers and print runs per title are decreasing, although a very few blockbuster titles stand outas exceptions. Third, due to the first two trends, publishers’ average income per title has decreased so that the entire book industry has become increasingly dependent on bestsellers. Yet, due to value differences among countries and cultures, the traditional publishing business model has come under a number of pressures and a variety of new book ecosystems has emerged.

Publishing and Society

Publishing reflects society, but can also influence society, because textual products fit into the wider economic, political, and cultural context. Publishing also varies according to its particular social setting: it is affected by diversity and demographics. Debates around education, language and culture all overlap with publishing. The industry cannot be separated from issues of identity, because books reflect social values and perceptions, and are thus linked to issues of gender, class, race (among other categories), and national identity. Published products thus sometimes reflect inequalities and may be used to entrench the interests of powerful groups, including governments.

Publishing History

The now established academic field of book history places an orthodox emphasis on the book as a material object, as a focus of diverse transactions, and as a social phenomenon. The role of the publisher has been relegated to the contributions of a few named individuals, often within a narrow eurocentric context, that highlight those individuals’ efficiency in book production and diminish the collective nature of the publishing process. A fresh approach to publishing history instead stresses the movement from the role of skilled reproduction houses, through trading in the copyright inherent in books, to the exploitation of content rights across a range of media. Such an approach provides a keener historical insight into the structures and operations of the contemporary global publishing industry.

Authorship

The culturally esteemed concept of the ‘Author’ is the product of the Anglophone world and emerged simultaneously with copyright and Romanticism from the early eighteenth century. Digital technologies present fundamental challenges to traditional conceptions and practices of authorship: digital texts are typically open to ‘readerly’ manipulation, and digital publishing has allowed more democratic forms of authorship such as self-publishing and crowd-funded publishing. Paradoxically, the digital domain has triggered a further elevation of the celebrity author figure, with author-maintained social media accounts providing readers with daily, or even real-time, communion with favourite authors. Authorship thus stands at a fascinating point: at once sacralized more than ever and yet, in theory at least, never more accessible to a mass public.