Reframing Book Publishing in the Age of Networking

This paper presents preliminary results of an on-going examination of book publishing practices emerging through the complex interaction of technological, economic, and socio-cultural factors in the networking environment of the Internet. The theoretical framework guiding the study is a diachronic definition of book publishing proposed by Thomas R. Adams and Nicolas Barker in ???A New Model for the Study of the Book,??? first published in A Potency of Life: Books in Society, by the British Library in 1993. The Adams/Barker definition of publishing focuses on ???the initial decision to multiply a text or image for distribution,???. In this paper, we propose what we intend as a friendly amendment to their definition: for our purposes, a book publisher is an individual or a collective that makes the initial decisions and arrangements for multiple copies of books to be publicly available for distribution. The methodology for this work was to study a purposive sample of book publishers found on the Internet that fit our definitional framework. Our final sample, which we call emerging publishers, is just under 300 publishers. This sample was divided into three categories: Category I: Book Publishing Entities; Category II Author as Publisher and Category III Channels to Market. Each category is sub-divided, defined and described. Tables are included which show the publishers in each category. The paper concludes with observations across categories about format, shifts in publishers??? roles, standards of publishing practice, costs, and discovery, reception and reading and survival.