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.

The economic impact of innovations depends on their technological characteristics and the market and organizational contexts in which they are adopted. In this chapter we focus on the market impact of innovations in terms of whether they tend to sustain or disrupt existing business models. Disruptive innovations usually cause rather extreme amounts of market uncertainty. Incumbent and entrant firms tend to have different capacities to address disruptive innovation opportunities. In particular, large and established customers of major incumbents tend not to prefer the disruptive value proposition, and, as a result, the return on investment in disruptive innovations appears to be lower than in the case of sustaining innovations.

This chapter examines the behaviour of various types of corporate actors, and their linkages, in the context of a fast-changing GVC. The restructuring of the TV industry around transnational production networks has created two types of companies (lead firms and suppliers), and two classes of suppliers (sector-specific and multisectoral). Using Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, the first section reflects on the impact of the digital revolution on lead firms and sector-specific suppliers. The second section focuses on the relationships between the different sets of actors and examines the modes of governance that prevail in the TV GVC. The thrust of corporate strategies, it argues, is strongly influenced by businesses’ positions in the GVC, and the power asymmetries between lead firms and suppliers are leading them to divergent approaches to integration. The final section demonstrates how the rise of the global suppliers (the tech giants) in the TV industry is furthering the global integration of the sector, and facilitating industry co-evolution through the formation of a supply base that is shared across several industries.

This chapter argues that market metafiction has emerged as the vanguard fictional style of the post-financial crisis period. It begins by discussing the work of Tao Lin and Chris Kraus. The remainder of the chapter analyses two recent works of market metafiction that exemplify the paradigm, even as they register and contest differing financial and literary market logics. In Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), attempts to deal with risk and uncertainty central to derivatives trading provide models for “hedging” between different forms of literary value, so that underperformance in market terms may be offset against critical approbation. In Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), meanwhile, the depredations of what David Harvey calls “the Wall Street–IMF–Treasury complex” are seen to be of a piece with the global publishing industry’s exploitation of images of African suffering. In his novel, Cole deliberately sidesteps these stereotyped and voyeuristic images, while at the same time acknowledging the privilege that permits him (now a relatively affluent and highly educated New Yorker) to perform precisely such a resistance to market-dictated convention.

This chapter argues that recent examples of market metafiction by Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, and Sheila Heti stake out a set of key positions that the ambitious novelist might adopt in the contemporary literary field. Beginning with an analysis of the improbable rise to literary fame of the long-obscure Zink, it identifies a recurrent logic, evident across all elements of the “Zink phenomenon”, including her 2016 novel Nicotine, whereby an embrace of market forces paradoxically enables the very writing that it at the same time threatens to destroy. Turning to Cohen, the chapter reads the sprawling, experimental Book of Numbers (2015) as an ambivalent attempt to channel the logic of the iconic “disruptors” of the contemporary tech sector. Finally, the chapter argues that in her memoir-cum-novel How Should a Person Be? (2010) Heti aims to produce a text that circumvents conventional forms of literary valuation by being neither merely desired (as a commodity on the market) nor simply admired (as an object of critical veneration), but existing instead as an object of use – a guide or tool with the potential to be strategically deployed by those who read it.