Chapter 8 - The Literary Marketplace

Summary

This chapter examines the production, circulation, and reception of books in the digital landscape, comprising a complicated entanglement between bricks-and-mortar bookstores and digital technologies that transforms every aspect of the way books are produced, published, distributed, and experienced. The history of the relationship between bookselling, reading devices, publishing and printing platforms, and the shape of the literary marketplace in the digital age reveals elements of the publishing circuit that are examined along with the increasing platformization of cultural production. The digital literary sphere affects authorship and the remuneration authors receive; the increased conflation between publishing and bookselling; the tension between e-books and print, and online versus bricks-and-mortar stores; and the relationship between fan fiction and literary consumption. The literary marketplace in the digital age is one marked by flux, but also the rise of new forms of access and new meaning for books and literature in the digital age.