The Enduring Role of Books in Sociology Publishing

Should something resembling books continue to be marketed a century hence, and if scholars at that time wish to learn how the book as a commodity fared between 2000 and 2020, they might well turn to John Brookshire Thompson’s Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing for mountainous details about ebooks, self-publishing, audio books, subscription services for readers, copyright debates, the imposing roles of Google Books and Amazon on the digitization, publishing, and sale of the Great Backlist of Western Culture, and related topics. In this thick volume they will see a series of carefully prepared market reports of the sort that a publishing company executive or retailer would have found indispensable in preparing the firm for the next round of informational transformations—had they been available before the tidal wave of digitization crashed over the sleepy village of paper-based publishing. And when read along with Thompson’s previous studies of mass culture (a term he disparages), a great deal can be learned therefrom about the production, promotion, and sale of printed matter and its rapid electronic metamorphoses. But perhaps even more humanly interesting, theoretically informative, and culturally revealing is the unusual scholarly and professional situation of the author himself over the last 45 years. According to British government records from December 31, 2020, Thompson (born July 1951) is registered as "American by nationality," and on November 3, 1983, at only 32, he was invited by his dissertation director (now Lord) Anthony Giddens to join him and his agemate, David Jonathan Andrew Held (1951– 2019) to form Polity Press, Ltd. As of December 2020, neither Giddens (resigned 2008) nor the late Held were attached to the firm, which employed 28 people and held net equity of £3.8M. Over the last 40 years Polity Press has published hundreds of works in the social sciences, many of them designed to be upper-level textbooks, but others, like large biographies of Durkheim and Weber, aimed at the scholarly audience. It is by all measures a very successful publishing venture that began with little more than Giddens’s annual outpouring of books, enhanced by the energetic participation of his two gifted doctoral students. In its early days lucrative co-publishing arrangements with Blackwell in the United Kingdom, and American university presses as well, created its initial market, a model that supported the company until it became self-sustaining. In 1975, when Thompson graduated from the University of Keele and moved to Cambridge for his doctorate in sociology, little could he have suspected that he would shortly become a junior executive to a commercially prosperous publishing company, surely one of the luckiest and least predictable academic trajectories on recent record. He has been known to social theorists of his cohort since October 1981 when Cambridge University Press published his dissertation, Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas. Within 250 pages Thompson assays Wittgenstein’s "ordinary language philosophy"—such concerns at the time were obligatory among British intellectuals— and also gives Ricoeur’s "hermeneutic Book Wars: The Digital Revolution in Publishing, by John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2021. 511 pp. $35.00 cloth. ISBN: 9781509546787.