Book publishing in the digital age:
Industry adaptation to the vulnerability of the paper book
Student Name: Anna Teresova Student Number: 12101877
Supervisor: Prof. Richard Rogers
Graduate School of Humanities MA New Media and Digital Culture University of Amsterdam
Master Thesis June 2019
2 Abstract
With the Internet embedding our everyday lives and transforming the ways of communication, work and entertainment, the traditional field of book publishing has been inevitably influenced by these digital changes. Although the process of producing a paper book has remained very much the same, the means of promoting the book and getting it into the readers’ notion are different. That is to say, the publishers have been forced to find new ways of attracting their readership that is now largely turning to their mobile phone and laptop screens instead of to the paper pages of books and newspapers. Whereas before people visited a library or a bookshop to search for information, nowadays they employ web search engines such as Google to find everything they need, including digitised books. Yet this shift inevitably generates new possibilities for getting books into people’s awareness both locally and globally. The rise of digital innovations has thus not only threatened the very existence of the book publishing but has also created before unseen possibilities of presenting both the paper and digital books. In order to support my argument, I will rely on the theoretical work of John Thompson (2005, 2010), Angus Phillips and Gilles Clark (2008), Lev Manovich (2001, 2018), Michael Bhaskar (2013), Asa Briggs and Peter Burke (2005), Manuel Castells (2001), Wendy Chun (2006), and others.
Analysing archived websites accessed through the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive as a starting point of my research, this study aims to explore and contextualise how the book industry has been transformed with the arrival of new media and digitisation, including both the book form and the book publishers themselves. Focusing on the Google Books Project consequently reveals how the traditional paper books have been digitised and made available online while the study of specific book publishers underlines how the publishers themselves have tackled the vulnerability of paper books when facing new media. Examining and comparing about 800 screenshots of eight book publishers’ websites and of the Google Books front page retrieved from the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive, this research argues that the book publishers have been proactive when facing the digital revolution, reacting to the arrival of webpages, mobile applications and social media. However, when assessing the scale of their adaptability in the new age, the case study points out that it is necessary to recognise the size of the publisher in order to avoid the generalisation. Independent book publishers have had less resources and consequently have not been as innovative and proactive as the large publishers when it comes to their online visibility.
3 Additionally, studying the evolution of the Google Books Project’s front page design over time, the study underlines the vulnerable asset of a paper book, its form. With the growing possibilities of digitisation, it is the book content that matters while its form can be easily transformed from an analogue to a binary code.
Moreover, situating the relatively young Google Books Project alongside the book publishers who, in some cases, have been on the market for decades enhances that although the book publishers have adapted certain elements from Google and Amazon – such as “Look Inside the Book” – they have managed to retain the importance of human over algorithmic editorship which can be clearly detected from their websites. That is to say, although the book publishers have borrowed some features originally introduced by the new technology giants like Google, Amazon and Apple, they have not emulated them but rather have remained truthful to their trade.
Putting the book publishers alongside the Google Books, the study contextualises the changes in the field of paper books brought by the new era of technology spanning from the end of the 20th century to the current days.
Keywords: Book Publishing, Big Five, Google Books, Websites, New Media, Digitisation, WayBack Machine
4 Table of Content
1. INTRODUCTION ……….. 5
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK ……… 8
2.1. Definitions of new media and digitisation ……… 8
2.2. The impact of new media ……….. 13
2.3. The action of publishing ……… 15
2.4. When new media meets the book publishing industry ……….. 16
3. CASE STUDY ……….. 22
3.1. The WayBack Machine and the Internet Archive ………. 22
3.2. The proposed case study ……… 23
3.3. Methodology ……….. 26
4. RESULTS ……….. 28
4.1. The book distribution and the project ‘Google Books’……….. 28
4.2. The online representation of books by large and independent English language book publishing houses ……… 44
5. CONCLUSION AND RECOMMANDATIONS ……… 72
5.1. Limitations and suggestions for future research ……… 74
Bibliography
Appendix 1 Additional links to the websites accessed through the WayBack Machine Appendix 2 Additional screenshots of the book publishers’ websites retrieved from the WayBack Machine
5 1. INTRODUCTION
The arrival of the Internet and digitisation has brought many changes into the traditional industries such as film making, music, journalism and book publishing. Google, Amazon, Apple and other technology companies have been changing the rules of the game, forcing the traditional industries to re-evaluate their practices. It is clear that physical paper books have survived the arrival of the Internet. Nevertheless, it has also become obvious that the digital revolution has had everlasting impact on the ways in which the nowadays audiences acquire, read and interact with books, both with the paper and the digital ones.
Publishing as such is interwoven with society as it touches on every aspect of knowledge, with the book being an enduring medium through which ideas are communicated and societies’ cultures depicted (Phillips and Clark, 2008, pp. 1-5). Ever since the Gutenberg’s revolution, initiated with the introduction of printing press, the book industry has undertaken many turbulent changes, touching on the revolutions in religion, science and education (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 2). Yet it was the invention of the Internet that has speeded up the pace of change affecting the publishers’ businesses at an unprecedented rate, with the new technologies effecting not only the production of books but also their marketing and selling in various print and digital formats (Phillips and Clark, 2008, p. 4). That is to say, no longer is book available only in bookshops and libraries but can be now also accessed, bought and read online. Moreover, demand is increasingly shaped through digital technology, such as collaborative filtering which has revolutionised the consumption of books: recommendations are made on the basis of algorithms, revealing an erosion of the status of traditional intermediaries within the market (Velthuis, 2012, p. 37). This process of disintermediation then underlines an erosion of the direct exchange between producers and consumers of cultural products and leaves space for new patterns of taste formation within cultural industries (Ibid.). Hence the traditional channels for promoting books – such as the New York Times – are no longer enough as they are becoming less effective in the face of new media, indicating the shift of marketing from traditional mainstream media to online channels (Thompson, 2010, pp. 243-251).
What used to work in the world of book publishing twenty years ago suddenly appears to be rather useless when facing the fast-changing content on the Internet and social media, creating new ways of communication. Books withstood the disruption of new modes of storytelling – the cinema, the TV set; just as books have been the disruptor themselves, unsettling the Roman Church and upending the French aristocracy, the medieval medical
6 establishment, then the nineteenth-century medical establishment (Nash, 2013, pp. 23-24). But it was the arrival of the Internet that has irrevocably shaken the normally stable basis of the book publishing. For many, the digital world offers the biggest revolution in publishing terms since the invention of the printing press, with stakes being high as publishers need to redefine themselves in light of this revolution (Hall, 2013, p. 1). Whereas before the readers’ opinions did not matter compare to the acclaimed book critics, the industry has been forced to amend its traditional chars of relations and draw readers directly into the field of literary production as authors, tastemakers and direct customers (Nolan and Dane, 2018, p. 154).
Looking at the statistics, it becomes clear that whereas back in between 2011 and 2012, and 2013 and 2014 the paper book market slowed down while the popularity of e-book was rapidly growing, 2017 was considered to be the third consecutive year of growth for physical books sales whereas the e-book market was showing signs of stagnation (Federation of European Publishers, 2018). This consequently suggests that despite all of the upheaval taking place in the book publishing houses, it seems that the book production has managed to establish its place once again when facing yet another revolution threatening its existence.
Following the above outlined development in the world of books, I am asking how the book publishers and a book itself have then actually reacted to the arrival of new media and digitisation, which have underlined the main vulnerability of a paper book – its form. This starting reflection then leads to the development of my case study that is fuelled by the following two research questions:
Q1: How has the paper book been stripped of its form and become a digitised content by new media?
Q2: How have the book publishing houses responded to the digitisation of their traditional industry through their online presence over time?
In order to both answer these questions and contextualise the results, I will be exploring the collections of screenshots of book publishers’ websites as well as the front page of Google Books Project, all retrieved from the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive. These archived websites, in some cases dating back to 1996, allow me to analyse the more traditional players encountering the Internet as well as the technology company, Google, meeting the traditional industry of books. Whereas the study of Google Books Project embodies the concept of digitisation and digitised books, having a closer look on the book
7 publishers’ websites reveals how they have tackled the vulnerability of paper books when encountering new media. Accordingly, I will be addressing the following sub-questions:
Q1a: How does the Google Books Project mirror the tension between the old medium - a paper book, and the new medium – the book’s digitised, searchable version?
Q1b: What does the transforming webpage of Google Books reveal about the relationship between Google, the large technology company, and book publishers and libraries, the traditional distributors of books, over time?
Q2a: How have the book publishing houses responded to the challenges created by new media and digitisation, intruding with their book distribution?
Q2b: What does the design of a publishing house’s website reveal about privileging of the algorithmic vs human editorship?
Q2c: How does the size of the book publishing house effect the publisher’s approach to its online distribution of visibility?
8 2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
The book publishing industry today is facing a progression of changes which is probably as profound as anything it has encountered since Johann Gutenberg introduced the traditional screw press for manufacturing printed texts (Thompson, 2005, p.1). One of the driving forces in this case of progression is no longer the screw press but another technological revolution, ushered in by digitisation (Ibid.). People became aware of this change through the form of digitisation already in the late 1980s, although back then it was not entirely clear what the exact impact would be (Ibid., p. 309). In other words, although the long established industry of book publishing has a worldwide distribution system which allows to measure, regulate and control its output, the publishers have been competing against other forms of entertainment and information sources, with new media being one of their main competitors (Phillips and Clark, 2008, p. 2). The following literature review is split into four sections, each helping to frame the topic of my thesis – the book publishing industry and its response to new media and digitisation. Firstly, I elaborate on the key words of my research questions, namely “new media” and “digitisation”. Secondly, I present the impact of new media on our everyday lives, from reading and writing to the general (in)ability of paying attention. Following this, I then examine the various definitions of ‘publishing’ and the ‘book publishing industry’. Lastly, I link the first two sections closely to the subject of book publishing and how new media have influenced the more traditional book publishing industry.
2.1.Definitions of new media and digitisation
What is “new media”, asks Lev Manovich a rather simple question (2001, p. 19). Although the term has been widely used and commonly understood as something that has to do something with ‘the Internet, Web sites, computer multimedia, computer games (…), virtual reality’ (Ibid.) and, as I would add here, with social media such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and others, the phrase itself is more complex than that. ‘The term “new media” came into prominence in the mid-1990s, usurping the place of “multimedia” in the fields of business and art (Ibid.). Unlike its predecessor, the term “new media” was not accommodating: ‘it portrayed other media as old or dead; it converged rather than multiplied; it did not efface itself in favour of a happy if redundant plurality’ (Chun, 2006, p. 1). Chun further continues by explaining that, since “new media” is a plural noun treated as a singular subject, it is the singular plurality of the phrase that stems from its negative definition – something that is fluid, individualises connectivity, something that is not mass
9 media but rather a medium to distribute control and freedom (Ibid.). In her theory, Chun contextualises “new media” by focusing on the individual words of the phrase, “media” and “new”. She highlights that ‘in terms of media, histories that reach from the Renaissance to the present day elide the fact that: one, although the word medium does stretch across this time period, its meaning differs significantly throughout; two, the plural-singular term “media” marks a significant discontinuity’ (2006, p. 2). This sense of ‘discontinuity’ becomes visible when one compares the varying definitions of the word “media” throughout the time. ‘According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), media stems from the Latin Medium meaning middle, centre, midst, intermediate course, intermediary (…)’ (Ibid.). Following the term “medium” then to the fifteenth century, back then it emerged as ‘an intervening substance in English, stemming from the post-classical Latin phrase per medium (through the medium of) in use in British sources since the thirteenth century’ (Ibid., pp. 2-3). This is, however, slightly different compare to the term “media”, which is linked to mass media. As Chun argues: ‘in the eighteenth century, paper was a medium of circulation, as was money; in the nineteenth century, electricity was a medium; in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, media emerged as the term to describe inexpensive newspapers and magazines and, in an affront to English and Latin, became a singular noun’ (Ibid., p. 3). Briggs and Burke further expand on this, explaining that according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was only in the 1920s that people began to speak of “the media”, which then led to the term of a “communication revolution”, which appeared in the 1950s (2005, p. 1). Yet despite the relatively short presence of “the media” in our society, certain phenomena and topics associated with this term are much older than is generally recognised, with the words such as “network” and “web” being already used in the nineteenth century (Ibid., pp. 3 and 5).
This notion of relative novelty then moves Chun’s focus to the problematic side of the use of the word “new” in the phrase “new media”. As she explains, ‘the new should have no precedent, should break with the everyday, and thus should be difficult, if not impossible, to describe’ (2006, p. 3). That is to say, when something is new, hence known or produced for the very first time, then following Descartes’ definition of the new we should fall into a state of wonder or surprise (Ibid.) Chun makes her point by discussing the ‘newness’ of the Internet back in 1995, the year when it arguably became recognised as something new (Ibid.). Yet as she claims, the sense of the Internet’s “newness” was not caused with its “invention” or its alleged mass usage, but instead it was linked to a political move to deregulate it and to increased coverage of it in the other mass media, leading to the situation
10 in which we accepted the Internet as something “new” because of the effort to make it new rather than its actual newness (Ibid.). The questionable use of “new” is also interestingly reflected by Arvind Rajagopal, who elaborates on McLuhan’s theory that old media appear as the content of new media, with the telegraph subsuming print in this way, television incorporating the cinema, radio and print, and the computer enveloping all the rest. (2006, p. 284). In other words, when Gutenberg introduced the printing machine to the world for the first time, it signified a new shift in means of communication. However, the same effect took place with the invention of telegraph, photography, moving images and cinema, radio, television, computer and the Internet, with all of them introducing new elements while also including, to a certain level, its formally revolutionary precedents which now had to make a place for the “new medium” entering the game. Indeed, old and new media can and do coexist and although different media might compete one another, they can also complement each other (Briggs and Burke, 2005, p. 19).
Lev Manovich similarly reflects on the revolutionary products that have changed the ways in which societies have functioned. In his theory on “new media”, he explains ‘that just as the printing press in the fourteenth century and photography in the nineteenth century had a revolutionary impact on the development of modern society and culture, today we are in the middle of a new media revolution – the shift of all culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution, and communication’ (2001, p. 19). However, compare to Chun’s lexical reading of “new media”, he defines this term from rather technical point of view, defying “new media” as ‘graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have become computable; that is, they comprise simply another set of computer data’ (Ibid., p. 20). Thus Manovich argues that in order to comprehend the logic of “new media”, it is necessary to include computer science, suggesting that when talking about “new media”, we move from media studies ‘to something that can be called ‘software studies’ – from media theory to software theory’ (Ibid., p. 48). Chun, on the other hand, maintains that despite the fact that “new media” indeed heavily depend on computerisation, it cannot be simply perceived as “digital media”, just as computation does not automatically lead to “new media” or to software (2006, pp. 1-2). Notwithstanding their different readings of the same phrase, my intention here is not to put these two theories opposite each other. I rather want to present them alongside each other in order to demonstrate the full complexity of “new media” and consequently its possible different definitions. Going back to the revolution in the history of media, Manovich claims that this one is more profound than any of its precedents – ‘the introduction of the printing press affected only one stage of cultural communication – the
11 distribution of media; the introduction of photography affected only one type of cultural communication – still images’ (2001, p. 19). Compare to these revolutions, the computer media revolution has a profound effect on all stages of communication, including acquisition, manipulation, storage, and distribution, while it also affects all types of media – texts, still images, moving images, sound, and spatial constructions (Ibid.). As he suggests, this ‘computer media revolution’ was possible as the development of modern media and the development of computers started approximately at the same time, resulting with mass media and date processing becoming complementary technologies that have made modern mass society possible (Ibid., pp. 22 – 23). He dates this back to the end of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when various mechanical and electrical tabulators and calculators appeared while modern media were able of storing images, sounds as well as texts in different material forms such as photographic plates, film stock or gramophone records (Ibid., p. 23).
Although the identity of computers has changed dramatically, the face of media has evolved even more, resulting with the current popular division of media into the old one and the new one. Here, Manovich divides the differences between “old” and “new media” into five principles: (1) numerical representation, (2) modularity, (3) automation, (4) variability, and (5) transcoding. By “numerical representation”, Manovich means that ‘all new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analogue media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations’ (Ibid., p. 27). Put it briefly, media becomes programmable (Ibid.). “Modularity” can also be titled as the ‘fractal structures of new media’: media elements such as images, sounds, shapes, etc., are represented as collections of discrete samples such as pixels, characters, scripts, etc. (Ibid., p. 30). Although these small elements are assembled into larger scale objects, they still maintain their separate identities, thus having the same modular structure throughout (Ibid.). “Automation” is possible through the combination of the first principle of the numerical coding of media and the second principle of the modular structure of a media object, leading to the automation of numerous operations that take part in media creation, manipulation, and access (Ibid., p. 32). The fourth principle, “variability”, reflects on the ways in which a new media object is not fixed but instead can exist in different, and possibly infinite versions. (Ibid., p. 36). Old media ‘involved a human creator who manually assembled textual, visual, and/or audio elements into a particular composition or sequence’, with its order being permanently determined and stored (Ibid.). “New media”, on the other hand, allow through its variability creation of many different versions that are not completely created by a human
12 author but rather automatically assembled by a computer, connecting the principle of variability to automation (Ibid.). When it comes to the last principle, “transcoding”, Manovich argues that ‘while from one point of view, computerised media still displays structural organisation that makes sense to its human users (…), from another point of view, its structure now follows the established conventions of the computer’s organisation of data’ (Ibid., p. 45). Following these principles, Manovich clearly differentiates “new media” from the older technical media objects such as radio or printed books.
One last difference needs to be made, and that is the one between “new media” and “digitisation” which, as it already becomes clear from the above paragraphs, are not the same. Digitisation is defined as ‘conversion of analogue content into digital format, in other words, a binary code’ (Manžuch, 2009, p. 771). The process of digitisation thus works with the already existing material and transforms it into a digital content. The digitisation of old media is then a process in which the old media have been transformed into a digital format but perform the same function, just as it is the case of the digital camera, digital television or digital library archives (Logan, 2010, p. 4; Manžuch, 2009, p. 771). “New media” are not new in the essence of the word “new” since they partially combine an older medium or even mediums, but compare to its older precedents they embody digital media that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication, they are linked and cross-linked with each other, and involve some form of computing compare to “old media” - such as telephone, radio or TV, thus making it easy to process, store, transform, retrieve, hyperlink as well as search the information which “new media” mediate (Chun, 2006; Manovich, 2001; Logan, 2010). Following these definitions, I will now keep using the phrase “new media” without the apostrophes, referring to the term established above rather than using an adjective to describe a newly introduced media.
Putting all of these definitions of the same term - new media - alongside each other, including the Manovich’s five principles that make new media different from the old one and Chun’s lexical definition of new media, I aimed to show that although the term new media is used on everyday basis, it represents not only computerisation or something brand new. It further covers a complex change in our society that has evolved from the ‘Gutenberg Galaxy’, as Marshall McLuhan called the effect of the printing press on our lives (1962), to a brand new society whose communication is now influenced by the speed and the digital networks of the Internet.
13 2.2.The impact of new media
Today, we live in a rapidly changing information and communication environment, with new technologies linked to digitalisation transforming the ways in which individuals interact with other (Thompson, 2005, p. 438). Indeed, the impact of new media on people’s everyday lives is immense – reaching from communication, to reading and writing, up to the capability of paying attention. In other words, ‘there is a struggle for attention going on. Free, unmediated brain time is in decline. The time between morning and evening TV has been occupied by smart phone entertainment’ (Sampson, 2017). Focusing on the society as such, the Internet can be described as the fabric of our lives as it distributes the power of information reaching through the entire scale of human activity, thus becoming the technological basis for the organisation form of the Information Age: the network (Castells, 2001, p. 1). Just as certain elements of new media are traceable back in history of human kind, so can networks be defined as old forms present in our lives for decades. However, powered by the Internet they have currently taken on a new shape by becoming information networks (Ibid.). Through their inherent flexibility and adaptability, networks have the advantages as organising tools capable of surviving as well as prospering in a fast-changing environment (Ibid.), which is much shaped by the speed of the Internet that helps to distribute information from, through and to these networks.
The Internet can be consequently described as a communication medium that allows the communication of many to many not only in local sectors but also on a global scale in any chosen time, something that is possible for the very first time in human history (Ibid., p. 2). Thus while McLuhan reflected on the changes within the society as a result of the printing press that transformed it into the Gutenberg Galaxy, Castells claims that we have entered a new world of communication: the Internet Galaxy (Ibid., p. 3). Just as communication is the core of human activity, the omnipresent use of the Internet inevitably modifies all domains of social life, which subsequently leads to a new social form, “the network society” (Ibid., p. 275). The network society fundamentally alters our communications, resulting with the creation of “mass self-communication”, with the phenomenon of all media merging in one digital system (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 42). However, while the Internet is heralded as the technology of freedom, the Internet networks providing global, free communication can prompt as many opportunities as challenges (Castells., pp. 275-277). It was already back in 2001 when Castells warned that the infrastructure of these networks can be owned and their uses may become biased and monopolised by commercial, ideological as well as political interests (Ibid., p. 277). His words are now affirmed by specific examples of abusive uses of
14 the Internet and social media in particular, such as the notorious Cambridge Analytica Scandal, which leaked private information of more than 50 million Facebook users to feed political interests (Cadwalladr, and Graham-Harrison, The Guardian), revealing the negative side of new media on our everyday lives.
The nowadays society is not only feeble to the outside political interests, but it has been also unwittingly slowly altered in its daily basic activities such as reading. As an increasing amount of information is becoming digital and being available online where people spend more and more time reading electronic media (Perrin and Jiang, 2018), this digital environment has inevitably started affecting people’s reading behaviour (Liu, 2005, p. 701). Reading, a complex and variable behaviour that requires different skills in handling documents, can be still defined as the most efficient method for communicating words, with a more complex society thus demanding increased rather than decreased reading (Ibid., pp. 701-702). However, the decline in long-term reading (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 3) only highlights the fact that the large amount of digital and digitised information that is available on the Internet has influenced people’s ability to focus on a long text as there is so much information they need to consume as fast as possible. Just as the process of reading and writing, alongside other elements such as technology, have built the world we are familiar with today, this has been recently influenced by what Robert Hassan identifies as a chronic and pervasive mode of “cognitive distraction” (2012, p. 3). This means that never has it been so difficult not to be distracted, with our resistance to it being so low and feeble (Ibid., p. 2).
Katherine Hayles employs two terms that further elaborate on this phenomena – deep and hyper attention. “Deep attention” is the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities and is characterised by concentrating on a single object for long periods – such as reading a long novel – while ignoring outside stimuli and having a high tolerance for long focus times (Hayles, 2007, p. 187). “Hyper attention”, on the other hand, is typical for rapidly switching focus among different tasks, being more comfortable with multiple information streams, looking for a high level of stimulation, and consequently having a low tolerance for boredom (Ibid.). Deep attention is then ideal for solving complex problems depicted by a single medium, while hyper attention stands out for its ability to negotiate rapidly changing environments in which multiple focuses compete for attention (Ibid., p. 188). However, this means that as a result of the later one, the person becomes impatient when focusing for long period on a non-interactive object such as a long text (Ibid.). Thus looking at the history of media, every new addition had a tendency to split people’s attention between the old medium, such as book, and the new medium, such as radio or television. Yet with the arrival
15 of new media as defined in the first section, the attention has been split among so many impulses that it has affected the ways in which we now execute our everyday activities such as writing, paying attention, and reading, struggling to pay attention to one task for a longer amount of time.
2.3. The action of publishing
The original meaning of the word ‘publish’ was not always linked to the printing press as the English word predates Gutenberg’s invention by at least seventy years, if not more when one takes into account its delay in reaching England (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 16). The earliest registered use of this word in the Oxford English Dictionary dates to 1382 in the Wycliffe Bible (Ibid.). ‘The word “to publish” stems from the Anglo-Norman puplier and the Middle French publier, loosely meaning to make public or known, to announce or to proclaim; both words trace back to the Latin puplicare, meaning to make public property or place at the community’s disposal’ (Ibid.). Yet, with the invention of the printing press, the meaning of the word has taken on a different form. The printing press did not immediately lead to the creation of “publishers” but rather to “printers”, who were printing out books. Only slowly, printers started realizing the financial potential of book production, with Henry Herringman (1628-1704) being one of the first who made a use out of the Licensing Acts from 1662 and bought rights to many significant writers of his days, thus turning the publishing landscape to his advantage (Ibid., pp. 17-25). Nowadays, publishers are no longer perceived as printers or mere ‘middle men’ interjecting themselves between authors and readers while making the profits out of their position (Phillips and Clark, 2008, p. 2). Rather, they are ‘content-acquiring and risk-taking organisations oriented towards the production of a particular kind of cultural commodity’ (Thompson, 2005, p. 15). That is to say, they add value to writers’ works by commissioning them, conferring the authority of their brand on authors’ works, financing the production as well as marketing, and selling as many books as possible (Phillips and Clark, 2008, p. 2). When one puts aside the commercial aspect of publishing, its core importance withstands. Publishing is often positioned at the heart of not only our literature, but also of our learning and thus our civil society, public spheres and political discussions, thus overall powering our culture (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 5). It is not a passive medium but rather a means of shaping the world by touching on every aspect of knowledge, allowing to communicate it (Bhaskar, 2013; Phillips and Clark, 2008).
Over the centuries, the publishers were facing many changes as well as challenges, yet with the advent of digitisation and thus digital publishing, the publishers have had to try
16 on more business models over the last 10 years than in their previous 200 years of publishing (Bhaskar, 2013, p. 4; Phillips and Clark, 2008, p. 1). One of the reasons of these experimentations in otherwise rather straightforward industry is the rise of online bookstores like Amazon which went on to develop an e-reader which consequently led to the market for reading on screen for pleasure instead of up-to-that point work (Phillips, 2014, p. xiii). Moreover, a project announced by Google in 2004, intending to scan and thus digitise millions of books and make them available through Google Books, was yet another shock to the traditional book industry, which seemed to be rather relatively slow to embrace the social networking sites that emerged in the mid- 2000s (Nolan and Dane, 2018, p. 155). All of these digital developments then created a whole new range of terminology around the book itself, such as vanilla book (the simple conversion of a printed text), enhanced e-books (with the addition of audio as well as video), and born digital e-books (products developed specifically for devices such as the iPad) (Phillips, 2014, p. xiii).
Following this brief outline of the evolution of publishing and book publishers, one can see that the pace of changes influencing this traditional industry has been quickening. However, ‘the challenge is not just being digital; it is being demonstrably relevant to the audiences who now turn first to digital to find content’ (O’Leary, 2010). This quest for relevance is then revealed through the publishers’ use of new media over time, which consequently offers an interesting case study of love and hate relationship between the traditional field of book publishing meeting the fast-paced industry of new media.
2.4.When new media meets the book publishing industry
Information is exploding around us, with information technology changing at bewildering speed (Darnton, 2009, p. 21). It was somewhere around 4000 BC when humans learned to write, with the Egyptian hieroglyphs going back to about 3200 BC and alphabetical writing to 1000 BC, all these dates marking important breakthroughs in the history of humanity in the form of writing (Ibid.). The electronic communication entered the scene centuries later, yet with its fast paced evolution it seems to be catching up on everything it had missed – the term Internet dates from 1974, with its precedent, ARPANET, dating back to 1969; the Web started as a means of communication among physicists in 1991, web sites and search engines became common in the mid-1990s, with the succession of brand names such as Mosaic, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and Google, founded in 1998 (Ibid., pp. 22-23). To further enhance the speed of the evolution in communication, we can put the year differences between the important dates alongside each other – it took 4 300
17 years from writing to the codex; from the codex to movable type, 1 150 years; from movable type to the Internet, 524 years; from the Internet to search engines, 17 years; from search engines to Google’s algorithmic relevance ranking, 7 years (Ibid., p. 23). And this timeline does not even include the evolution of social media with the advent of Web 2.0 that through its infrastructure allowed the birth of social media platforms shortly after the turn of the millennium, offering new online communication tactics through platforms such as Wikipedia (launched 2001), MySpace (launched 2003), Facebook (launched 2004), Flickr (launched 2004), YouTube (launched 2005), Twitter (launched 2006) and many others (van Dijck, 2013, pp. 4-7). The vast scale of the available digital content and the amount of people who interact with it can be seen in the following – the Web has 14 billion Web pages; 2 billion photos are shared daily; and as of 2018, there are 4 billion internet users and 3.1 billion active social network users, with 9 in 10 of these users accessing these platforms via mobile devices, although these numbers have been further growing (Manovich, 2018; Kemp, 2018).
Compare to this, the book publishing has much longer, and maybe one could even claim much more stable history. The book publishing industry has existed in the West since the late fifteenth century, when Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press initiated a flourishing trade in books throughout the urban centres of Europe (Thompson, 2005, p. 15). Despite its long presence and the seemingly same physical look of a book, however, the industry has undertaken certain changes. John Thompson identifies four important developments in the field of book publishing in the recent years: (1) the growing concentration of resources, (2) the changing structures of markets and channels to market, (3) the globalisation of markets and publishing firms, (4) the impact of new technologies (2005, pp. 8-10). The first two developments have much in common since they reflect on the process of concentration or ‘conglomeratisation’ as mergers and acquisitions have led to growing concentration of power and resources in the hands of large corporations (Ibid., p. 8). A prime example of conglomeratisation could be another term, ‘googlisation’. This refers to Google attempting to take over industry after industry, with its Google Books Project also threatening the traditional book publishers (Rogers, 2018, p. 3). Alongside this consequently goes the changing structure of the retail trade, particularly the rise of retail chains such as Barnes & Noble in the US, and WHSmith and Waterstone’s in the UK, and the online retailers like Amazon (Thompson, 2005, p. 8). All of these examples reveal how these changes have transformed the nature of bookselling and has altered the balance of power between publishers and booksellers (Ibid.). These important developments then contribute
18 to the third one, the increasing globalisation of market and publishing companies (Ibid., p. 9). However, it is the last development, the digital revolution, that embodies a major force for transforming the publishing industry (Ibid., p. 10). Thompson further elaborates on the impact of new digital technologies, distinguishing once again four different levels at which they can affect the business of publishing: (1) operating systems; (2) content management and the digital workflow; (3) sales and marketing; and (4) content delivery (2010, p. 321). It is particularly the content delivery that I want to focus on. It is the very content of the publishing houses that represents, in the end of day, a digitisable asset (Thompson, 2005, p. 9). The digital revolution has made publishers increasingly aware of the fact that their assets have comprised not just their warehouses stacked with books but also the content that is realised precisely in those books (Ibid.). In other words, before it was the content rather than the books themselves that alongside the copyright ownership controlled what the publishers could do with the content, which represented in some respects their key asset (Ibid.). But with the Internet containing so much digital information, from music, movies, photographs, to news and books, suddenly it appeared that the digitised content of the books was enough to the readers who seemingly did not require to hold on to the physical copy of a book. In essence, the digitisation of content subsequently dissociates content and form. Capturing content in a way that separates the content from the particular form in which it is, or typically was, realised, reveals that the real value of the book lies in the content that is embedded in the physical form of the book, rather than in the physical form as such (Thompson, 2010, p. 330). A similar notion can be found in the theory of new media, where Manovich reflects on the topic of the human-computer interface that also separates the old union of content and form. He argues that, for example, depending on the bandwidth of the Internet connection, a Web site can lead the user to different versions of the site (2001, p. 66). Thus in computer culture it is common to construct a number of various interfaces to the same “content”, which then could mean that a new media artwork possesses two separate levels: content and interface, inevitably rewriting the old divisions content-form and content-medium (Ibid.). Looking at these formal divisions, modern artists assumed that content and form cannot be separated, just as it was perceived in the book publishing industry (Manovich, 2001, p. 66; Thompson, 2010). Yet, the arrival of new media has suggested the opposite –a particular sequence of the user’s activities over time when interacting with the work, with the work’s interface creating its unique materiality and a unique user experience, leads to the situation where even a small change of the interface changes the work dramatically (Manovich, 2001, pp. 66-67).
19 The digitisation of content then inevitably changes its form, allowing to interact and work with the content in various ways, something impossible before. This occurrence of the online content has consequently let to ‘automatic computational analysis of the content of all online digital media, personal online behaviours and communication, and automatic actions based on this analysis’ (Manovich, 2018, p. 473). Defined as “media analytics”, this stage represents the newest development of modern technological media, impacting everyday cultural experiences of significant percentages of people across the globe who use the Internet and computing devices (Ibid., pp. 474, 476). The practices and technologies of media analytics are employed in most platforms and services where people in one way or other share, purchase, and interact with cultural products as well as with each other (Ibid., p. 477). ‘They are used by companies to automatically select what will be shown on these platforms to each user, and how and when, including updates from friends and recommended content’ (Ibid.). Companies that are perceived as big names in the age of new media and digitisation, such as Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook or Instagram, represent the key players in data processing (Ibid., pp. 479-480), all of them being relatively young companies and all of them heavily relying on media analytics. Compare to them, the older players are only gradually moving toward adoption of analytics, nevertheless, key decisions such as publishing a book are still made by individuals following their instincts rather than computational media analytics (Ibid., p. 480). This last note thus suggests that book publishing houses are opening to the options the digital revolution has to offer, yet they still largely depend on individuals and their experience on which they consequently base their decisions. Here, I want to put Manovich’s claim alongside the figure of Claire Wilshaw, currently working as an audience development director at one of the largest publishing houses in the United Kingdom as well as worldwide, Penguin Random House. Her role is to use site analytics and insights from newsletters as well as social media in order to create a detailed picture of the publishing house’s readers and consequently being able to divide them into specific groups in order to connect the right readers with the right book (Harvey, 2016). The access to the endless results retrieved through media analytics from the Internet, social media, newsletters and other, has opened a new function in the world of book publishing – audience development (Manovich, 2018; Harvey, 2016). As Wilshaw notes, ‘analytics and consumer insight inform all of our activity’ (Harvey, 2016). Following this example, I would like to consequently adjust Manovich’s claim about the old players listening to their instincts when it comes to publishing books and in general making their work decisions. What I want to suggest is that it is also important to acknowledge and differentiate the publishing houses’
20 sizes and resources when talking about their decisions behind the process of book publishing. I believe that publishing houses of a smaller size – such as Granta Books – still heavily rely on the individuals’ decisions, much more than the large publishing houses. Yet this is not the case because they do not want to become open to the possibilities offered through media analytics but because they simply cannot afford to conduct such a research into their audience, or the size of their audience does not offer them so much insightful information. Larger publishing houses, such as Penguin Random House or Hachette Book Group, on the other hand, have a very different starting point, possessing larger resources as well as audiences, which means they need media analytics in order to navigate themselves in the growing number of different types of readers interacting with their websites and social media. This then leads to an interesting research question, addressing the topic of different uses of the Internet and social media by large and small publishing houses in order to see if they are any differences at all when it comes to online practises of independent and rather small publishing houses compare to the international global book companies.
Yet, to the outside observer it may seem as if the book publishing industry ‘has remained largely unscathed by the technological change that is sweeping through other sectors of the creative industries, stubbornly refusing to enter the digital age (…), but this would be a profoundly misguided view’ (Thompson, 2010, p. 320). Indeed, the revolution has been taking place in publishing, however, it is “a revolution in the process” rather than “a revolution in the product”, with the final product, the book, still looking the same, but the process by which it is produced being fundamentally different (Ibid.). Thompson then dubs this revolution as “the hidden revolution” (Ibid.), which provides many research directions to take in order to uncover these ‘hidden’ transformations in the field of book publishing. The Internet has introduced new possibilities of entertainment and information sources, thus both directly and indirectly transforming the more traditional industries, such as the book publishing. With people swiftly switching their attention among different sources of stimulation, how have the book publishers represented themselves to their readers in order to remain relevant? Do they use the Internet and new media as a way of attracting new audiences by disconnecting from their original form, just as The New York Times did when it encountered the Internet for the first time, aiming to attract different types of readers through their online news presentation (Hermens, 2011)? In other words, do the book publishers find themselves in new media or do they remain largely the same, and how responsive have they been to these digital challenges over time? However, if the above described digital revolution in the book publishing world remains rather hidden to the public,
21 as Thompson claims, what methods can I use in order to uncover, analyse and study it? Reviewing the archived front pages of Google Books’ as well as of selected book publishers’ websites retrieved from WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive, I want to follow the websites’ design and content changes over time and contextualise them. This will eventually help me to both illuminate this hidden revolution in the book publishing and it will also create a larger narrative of how the paper book has been stripped of its form, and it will elaborate on how the book publishing houses have responded to new media and digitisation through their very own online activity.
22 3. CASE STUDY
Coming out of what Thompson identified as four developments in the field of book publishing - the growing concentration of resources, the changing structures of markets and channels to market, the globalisation of markets and publishing firms, and the impact of new technologies (2005, pp. 8-10); in my case study I want to closely focus on the last point he makes – the impact of new technologies. However, through my paper I will also touch on the other three developments in the book publishing industry as they are all interconnected. People were predicting that with the evolution of the Internet, the importance of book publishing and physical books would vanish in face of the new possibilities introduced by digitisation and new media (Phillips, 2014, p. xii). Assessing this claim now, it becomes obvious that this claim was far away from truth since books have not disappeared but rather evolved in the digital environment (Ibid.). Nevertheless, this evolution inevitably involves certain transformations caused by this new environment. Namely, the Internet allowed to digitise the books’ content and spread it online. As a result, people can now search for the content on their computers and smartphones instead of in libraries or paper catalogues, forcing the book publishing houses to spend more resources on building their online presence. Here, the appointment of Claire Wilshaw as an audience developer director in Penguin Random House is only one of many examples supporting this claim. Following what was established in the previous chapter, the book publishers have been occupying themselves with the question of both delivering content in new formats and developing new platform approaches (Hall, 2016, p. 29). Indeed, they need to address and actively react to the digital revolution as books have been attracting attention from large technology players such as Google, that got charmed by books’ quality content; or Apple and Amazon, which developed an e-reader that led to opening the market for reading on screen (Phillips, 2014, pp. xii-xiii).
3.1. WayBack Machine and the Internet Archive
Following all of these transformations and little revolutions in the book industry, my goal is to not only map these changes but to also contextualise them and thus successfully narrate the history of the book publishers reacting to and interacting with the age of Internet, new media and digitisation. In order to do so, I will use the WayBack Machine of the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive itself was founded by Brewster Kahle back in 1996 to archive ‘everything’ (Rogers, 2019b, p. 43). The WayBack Machine, launched in 2001 with its original slogan ‘surf the Web as it was’, was created in part as a solution to the 404 problem,
23 the code signifying that the file or webpage is not found (Ibid., p. 44; Rogers, 2019a, Chapter 5). But having the Alexa toolbar installed in a browser, the web browser user that was facing the 404 error message would receive a flashing WayBack icon on the toolbar indicating that the missing page could be accessed in the Internet Archive (Ibid.). This procedure, with the WayBack Machine as a core of it, thus maintained the web as a surfer’s medium rather than the searcher’s medium, which came after, as the surfing continued within the archive itself and was not limited by the missing content (Rogers, 2019b, p. 44). Moreover, if the hyperlink was not saved, rather than allowing broken pathways the Internet Archive directed the user to the archived webpage that was closest in time to the original (Ibid.).
The interface thus enables to see the web as a history of single websites or URLs that evolve through time, consequently offering new ways of studying the evolution of these websites (Ibid.). As Richard Rogers explains, ‘from the standpoint of web historiography, a website history or single-site biography may be understood as the unfolding of the history of the website, and with it a variety of stories may be told’ (2019a, Chapter 5). Web history can be distinguished from digital history since it concerns employing the web to tell its own story, in the tradition of medium history (Ibid.). This sense of narration can be then approached from three different sides: (1) web or medium history, studying the history of the web through a single website or webpage like Google Web Search; (2) media history, following the history of the web as media – such as how a traditional newspaper has responded to the new medium; (3) digital history, exploring the history of a particular institution, organisation or an idea (Ibid.). Just as these three categories can stand by themselves, one can also see how in some cases they may blend in together and intermix (Ibid.). Having all of these possibilities on my mind, below I propose my case study that heavily relies on WayBack Machine’s archiving of the fast-changing webpages in order to collect, analyse and contextualise the changing design and content of the websites’ front pages related to books and their publishing.
3.2. The Proposed Case Study
Coming out of my literature review that reflects on both the traditional industry of book publishing as well as on the emergence of new media and digitisation, this case study aims to explore the relationship between the Internet, physical books and the online presence of books and publishing houses. The goal of my case study will be thus to answer the following two research questions:
24 1. How has the paper book been stripped of its form and become a digitised content
by new media?
2. How have the book publishing houses responded to the digitisation of their traditional industry through their online presence over time?
In order to fully elaborate on these questions and include as much valuable data as possible, I will divide the case study into two subcategories: (1) the book distribution and the project ‘Google Books’; and (2) the online representation of books by large and small English language book publishing houses. These carefully chosen subsections not only help me to build up my case and, when put alongside each other, create the full narrative of paper books and their publishers encountering the digital world of the Internet; but their specificity also significantly narrows down the number of potential websites I could choose for the analysis.
1. The book distribution and the project ‘Google Books’
As Thompson points out, the book content is easy to digitise and to distribute on the Internet, which is something that Google became quickly aware of. As a response, in 2004 the company launched ‘Google Print’, the book search interface now known as ‘Google Books’ available in over 35 languages offering digitised books, importing the pre-internet writing into the digital database (Google Books History, 2019; Rosenberg, 2017). Following the changes on the front page of Google Books, and employing Rogers’ proposed third strategy of using web archiving in order to tell the history of an idea – in this case the idea of making books available through their digitisation – I want to explore the alterations the Google Books Project has undertaken from the first time it was launched back in October 2004 up until March 2019, and how it might have diverged from its original idea to ‘work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalogue of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers’ (Rogers, 2019a, Chapter 5; Google Books Library Project, 2019). For example, I will reflect on how the Google Books’ front page has responded to the law case “Authors Guild v. Google, Inc.”, in which a writers’ advocacy agency, the Authors Guild, alleged back in 2005 that Google is committing mass copyright infringement by scanning books as a part of the Google Books Library Project, resulting with the US Supreme Court ruling in 2016 that Google does not breach law and is thus consequently allowed to continue with the Library Project (Johns and Huthwaite, 2016). When analysing the collected screenshots, I will be addressing the following questions:
25 • How does the Google Books Project mirror the tension between the old
medium – a paper book, and the new medium – the book’s digitised, searchable version?
• What does the transforming webpage of Google Books reveal about the relationship between Google, the large technology company, and book publishers and libraries, the traditional distributors of books, over time?
2. The online representation of books by large and small English language book publishing houses
With the Internet influencing the movement of sales from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers such as Amazon; and the new reality of consumers finding out about books largely through online channels, publishers have been forced to adjust all their thinking about how they put books into the marketplace (Shatzkin, and Riger, 2019, ‘Introduction’). Following Rogers’ proposed possibility of using the WayBack Machine to study the history of media – in this case a book publishing house – and to see how this media has reacted to the web over time, I want to examine book publishing houses through time and contextualise the changes on their websites. With the English language leading the chart of top ten languages used on the Web (Internet World Stats, 2018), I decided to focus on the publishing houses run in English, notably those that reside and originate in the United Kingdom. When narrowing down the wide scope of book publishers I could possibly study, I decided to include the so-called “Big Five”, the book publishing houses that have been buying smaller publishing houses and nowadays account as the five most powerful as well as largest companies when it comes to producing books - Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan (Shatzkin, and Riger, 2019, ‘Introduction’). However, in order to see if there are any differences between the websites of these large publishing houses and those who do not have the same financial resources, I also aim to include three – compare to the above listed “Big Five” – small and, most importantly, independent British book publishers. Namely, these are Granta Books, Serpent’s Tail, and Sand Stone Press. Gathering screenshots of front pages of eight publishers’ websites inevitably results with a large number of data to study, which I assess by answering the following questions:
• How have the book publishing houses responded to the challenges created by new media and digitisation, intruding with their book distribution?
26 • What does the design of a publishing house’s website reveal about privileging
of the algorithmic vs human editorship?
• How does the size of the book publishing house effect the publisher’s approach to its online distribution of visibility?
2.3. Methodology
As a starting point of my methodology, I followed the instructions outlined by Richard Roger (2019a, Chapter 5), however, I did some minor adjustments.
After establishing all of the websites I want to study, in order to make a list of their archived versions I use the Internet Archive WayBack Machine Link Ripper available at the Digital Methods Initiative, in the section ‘Tools’ (2019). I individually enter the URL I want to be captured from the WayBack Machine (such as https://www.penguin.co.uk), opting to remove duplicates by default and choosing to retrieve only one WayBack result per month as I want to study changes over years rather than weeks or even days. The tool then creates a list of links of the archived pages available for the entered URL, which I download as a text file.
Secondly, I use the Screenshot Generator available at the Digital Methods Initiative (2019). This tool produces screenshots for a list of URLs, making a screenshot of each achieved webpage from my WayBack Machine URL list. In order to get the best quality screenshots clearly capturing the whole webpage, I opt to ‘Capture entire page’, in the ‘Advanced Options’ I select 1024x768 (Classic desktop) as a screen dimension, and set 400 seconds of ‘Requested timeout’ and 40 seconds of ‘Delay/sleep between requests’. Once this is set-up, I enter one URL per line, in total aiming to enter a span of two years, that is 24 links, so the large amount of URLs would not cause a heavy load on the remote host. This allows each archived webpage to be properly loaded before its screenshot is captured by the tool, producing clear and easy-to-read screenshots rather than blank pages. However, sometimes I have to retrieve another list from the Internet Archive WayBack Machine Link Ripper as the original URL was not archived and the Internet Archive would redirect me to its closest archived version and thus not capturing a good screenshot. Once the screenshots are done, I download them as a single ZIP files.
Thirdly, I go through the screenshots and eliminate those that do not demonstrate any changes compare to their predecessors. I also delete those that show only a black or blank screen.
27 After creating all the list of the archived pages, taking screenshots of them and clearing the final collections, I can start studying them.
28 4. RESULTS
4.1.The book distribution and the project ‘Google Books’
During my research ahead of this case study, I noticed that certain names and companies kept reappearing when discussing the revolution of book publishing by the arrival of the Internet – namely Amazon, Google, Apple and Barnes & Noble (Thompson, 2005 and 2010; Bhaskar, 2013; Phillips, 2014). Indeed, all of these names have changed the ways in which books are now accessed and read. Using WayBack Machine, it was the Google Books Project that outlined significant findings and revealed how the distribution of books has been influenced by the new media technology companies and the possibilities of digitisation.
For some people, Google represents the Internet itself, with the search engine front page being the first point of access to the Internet (Rogers et al., 2008). Despite Google’s current dominance, back in the early 2000s the company found itself in the search engine wars, facing its main rivals, Yahoo and MSM (Thompson, 2010, p. 357). Google believed that by ensuring that more high-quality content would be turned up in search results, the company could effectively increase its market share (Ibid.). In other words, Google wanted to add more qualitative content to its database so that the users could be provided with a richer body of material – scanning books and adding them to the database was one of the possibilities of doing that (Ibid.). As a result, in 2004 the publishing world became concerned by what Google titled the Google Library Project and the Partner Program, which together have formed Google Books. The Partner Program consists of persuading publishers to allow Google to scan their books (Ibid.). The publishers would benefit out of this potential agreement by bringing their books to the attention of the search engine’s users, ‘who would be able to browse a few pages in Book Search and click on a link to Amazon, to the publisher’s website or to another retailer to buy the book’, thus becoming ‘a free form of online marketing’ (Ibid.). The publishers would have a contract with Google and would be thus able to edit the available text or even remove it, thus this project was not the publishers’ main concern (Ibid.). They were much more scared of the Google Library Project, which Google titled as ‘an enhanced card catalogue of the world’s books’ (Google Books, 2019). Google has collaborated with several libraries such as Harvard, Stanford and many others in order to ‘to include their collections in Google Books and, like a card catalogue, show users information about the book, and in many cases, a few snippets – a few sentences to display the search term in context’ (Thompson, 2010, p. 357; Google Books, 2019). What was the impact of this project on the physical books and how did the above described projects have influenced relationships between Google and the book publishers?
29 • How does the Google Books Project mirror the tension between the old medium - a
paper book, and the new medium – the book’s digitised, searchable version?
The key role in this relationship between the old and new media plays the act of digitisation. As already established, to digitise something means to convert the analogue content into its digital format with the object itself performing the same function (Manžuch, 2009; Logan, 2010). If the creators of the Google Books Project want to ‘organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’ (Google Books History, 2019), they need to digitise hundreds of books and make them available to people who can then easily search among the titles. Starting with the last captured screenshot in my compiled collection dating to March 1st 2019, Google Books presents itself as a catalogue of books, yet the design of the search engine seems to lack having any connection with books as such (Figure 1). Instead, Google Books shows a rather blank looking front page that except its title and a short description below the search bar does not suggest being any different from the main Google search engine’s front page:
30 Figure 2 Google Front Page March 1, 2019 This suggests that the entering point to the ‘book catalogue’ does not differentiates itself from Google’s front page. This sense of mirroring then highlights that by putting forward the efficiency of search it misses on the connection to the objects it has digitised, the books. The blankness of the front page and Google’s approach to the process of accessing books additionally recalls Manovich’s five principles of the differences between old and new media (2001, pp. 27 – 45). In order to access the old medium, a book, one needs to encounter a person – such as in a bookshop or in a library. However, the digitised form of a book allows the user to search for it online through a process that does not require a human involvement but rather an algorithm that determines what the relevant result is for the user’s research query, referring to what Manovich identifies as automation and variability, meaning that new media lead to the automation of numerous operations such as access, inevitably leaving out the human creator who would manually assemble the searched version (2001, pp. 32 – 36).
Yet, the simple outlook of the Google Books’ front page did not always look like this. Studying the first captures of the Google Books front page, one can find small, yet noteworthy differences (Figure 3). I will not comment on the tabs appearing above the search bar as they represent an extension to Google Search Engine and although they reveal significant changes over time, this topic was already discussed in a study done by Richard Rogers and his colleagues (see Rogers et al., 2008, ‘Google and the Politics of Tabs’). Instead, I want to focus on everything appearing below them. From the first glance, the page seems to be more filled up with text, which mirrors the book pages filled up with words.
31 This style remained similar throughout the upcoming years, with some minor changes (Figure 6). In April 2006, Google no longer presents the link to ‘Hear what people are
Figure 3 Google Books Front Page, November 24, 2005
