15. Amazon and Automated Recommendations: Distribution and Discovery in the Book Trade

Julian Thomas

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15. Amazon and Automated Recommendations: Distribution and Discovery in the Book Trade

Julian Thomas
Julian Thomas

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29515Amazon and Automated RecommendationsDistribution and Discovery in the Book TradeJulian ThomasThe “digital age” in books once offered a familiar promise, a future where the restrictions of commerce on the circulation of books would evaporate. The first public “digital library” may have been Project Gutenberg, created in 1971 at the University of Illinois by the futurist technologist Michael Hart, also an early pioneer of electronic books. Hart believed in the “unlimited distribution” of books (Economist 2011). On his death in 2011, his friend Gregory Newby observed that the “invention of e-books was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that e-books are an effi-cient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature” (Newby 2011). That promise remains utopian in the present world of books, where dramatic and unexpected change occurs alongside surprising continuities.The successes and failures of the e-book over several decades exem-plify the complexities of current book distribution. Digital book formats have found new markets, but rather than enabling unlimited distribu-tion, many of them have been designed to make sharing or reselling more difficult than for print formats. At the same time, there is now reason to question the assumption that the e-book represents the book’s inevitable digital future. In the United States, industry statistics based on publishers’ sales report that e-book revenues fell by 3.8 percent in the year to August 2019, as revenue for paper formats increased by 2.5 per-cent (Association of American Publishers [AAP] 2019b). (These figures do not include sales of self-published works on Amazon and other sites.) In the United Kingdom, Publishers Association figures for 2014–18 sug-gest several significant trends: slowly declining e-book sales, growing physical book sales over four years before a decline in 2018, and the

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29515Amazon and Automated RecommendationsDistribution and Discovery in the Book TradeJulian ThomasThe “digital age” in books once offered a familiar promise, a future where the restrictions of commerce on the circulation of books would evaporate. The first public “digital library” may have been Project Gutenberg, created in 1971 at the University of Illinois by the futurist technologist Michael Hart, also an early pioneer of electronic books. Hart believed in the “unlimited distribution” of books (Economist 2011). On his death in 2011, his friend Gregory Newby observed that the “invention of e-books was not simply a technological innovation or precursor to the modern information environment. A more correct understanding is that e-books are an effi-cient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature” (Newby 2011). That promise remains utopian in the present world of books, where dramatic and unexpected change occurs alongside surprising continuities.The successes and failures of the e-book over several decades exem-plify the complexities of current book distribution. Digital book formats have found new markets, but rather than enabling unlimited distribu-tion, many of them have been designed to make sharing or reselling more difficult than for print formats. At the same time, there is now reason to question the assumption that the e-book represents the book’s inevitable digital future. In the United States, industry statistics based on publishers’ sales report that e-book revenues fell by 3.8 percent in the year to August 2019, as revenue for paper formats increased by 2.5 per-cent (Association of American Publishers [AAP] 2019b). (These figures do not include sales of self-published works on Amazon and other sites.) In the United Kingdom, Publishers Association figures for 2014–18 sug-gest several significant trends: slowly declining e-book sales, growing physical book sales over four years before a decline in 2018, and the

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