Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing

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This book tells the story of the turbulent decades when the book publishing industry collided with the great technological revolution of our time. From the surge of ebooks to the self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks, Book Wars provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of technological disruption in one of our most important and successful creative industries. For this reason we must understand war and how it is won. And we must understand what it does to people. Doing this helps us politically, socially, and consciously. It also helps us with whatever we happen to be doing. Wars are textbooks in logistics, planning, leadership, and execution. We can learn those skills by studying the best. We can also learn what not to do from the wars and generals who fared badly.

This was a fascinating look at the world of books and how the evolution of digital technology has changed the publishing world and its' outlook over the years! While aimed at a broad readership, one suspects that publishing specialists would also benefit from reading it, due to its analysis of many book business models and technologies under development. The Art of War by Sun Tzu. In some ways, I find this book hard to apply (and easy to misapply) because it’s so aphoristic and general. But it is of course one of the most important texts on warfare and strategy ever written. If you don’t leave with a couple good lines — like knowing yourself as well as you know the enemy — you’re missing out. Predicting our climate future: what we know, what we don't know, what we can't know October 12, 2023

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I’m certainly not recommending every book about war ever written, or even every book I’ve read on the subject, but instead a collection of the most meaningful. I’m sure I’ll miss some great books you’ve loved, so please suggest them in the comments.

What Thompson, Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, offers up as the real basis of the book is his knowledge of the ‘hidden revolution in the processes of book publishing’, and he weaves the stories of the ‘innovators’ throughout the chapters. Thompson explains in his ‘Note on Research Methods’ that his book is based on face-to-face interviews with those within publishing and those outside, ‘the many players, large and small, […] experimenting with digital technologies in ways that could affect the creation, production, distribution and consumption of books and long-form reading’ (489). Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier.This is sort of a bonus recommendation. Though this book is fiction (and was at the time extraordinarily popular — and eventually a bad movie), it is actually quite good. Not only that, it covers a few themes that are quite important to the Civil War. One is the home guard, which patrolled for deserters and draft dodgers (on both sides) with brutal effectiveness. The war basically descended into gang violence in the middle states. Second, it includes the Battle of the Crater, which Inman fought in. It’s not very well known but incredibly strange. Third, the disillusionment of Confederate soldiers at the end of the war. People forget how utterly beat the South was (in large part due to the strategies of Sherman) and how this made many people realize how utterly bankrupt the cause was. Thompson also shares with the reader statistical analyses of both public as well as private sales data from the industry. Of particular value is the statistical analysis appearing in the chapter on the explosion in self-publishing. Thompson’s work is authoritative and will be of tremendous value to future readers and researchers in understanding how a 500-year-old culture of print was able to absorb and adapt. I’m aware of no other title that provides such a useful account of how publishing professionals have fought to ensure stabilization and reliable delivery of content. BookWars received the Best Documentary Award upon its world premiere at the 2000 New York Underground Film Festival. The film was also nominated for an IFP Gotham Award.At the same time, Beat writer and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Bookstore viewed the cut of BookWars, and applauded it as being “Anarchistic”. A book and audiobook titled 10,000 Miles to Go: An American Filmmaking Odyssey, [4] about the unusual physical and creative process behind the making of BookWars, was published in 2015.

In Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing , John B. Thompson explores the digital transformations that have turned book publishing on its head over the last 30 years. Offering a noteworthy study of recent changes to the publishing world, this work is well worth reading to understand where the book was in the latter part of the twentieth century and where it is headed well into the twenty-first, writes Amy Lewontin . The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost by Victor Davis Hanson. This book tells of five different generals, each who came in and saved a war that was otherwise likely to be lost. Those generals are Themistocles, Belisarius, Sherman, Ridgway (in Korea), and Petraeus (in Iraq).

The granular data on the publishing industry is this book's strength. Sometimes that's pretty dull (who cares exactly what rate mp3s overtook cassettes in audiobook sales?), but sometimes it's really interesting: according to sales of one publisher in 2016, e-books account for more than half of total book sales for romance novels, 30-45% for other fiction, 10-30% for fiction but only 5% for kids' books (possibly because the less linear and/or text-only a book is, the less pleasant its e-book experience is).