In the 1990s, just as many independent booksellers were lamenting the rise of huge book superstores with espresso cafés and cushy chairs, an Internet start-up in Seattle called Amazon.com started selling books online. For years after its 1995 debut, Amazon didn’t turn a profit, but its book sales grew steadily as it offered more books than even the superstores could hold and often undercut them on price. Subsequently, Amazon became responsible for about one-fifth of all consumer book sales, and the superstores that were once blamed for the wane of independent bookstores were also on the decline.

Amazon changed the industry again in 2007 with the Kindle, the first portable and lightweight e-book reader that let readers download electronic books (e-books) wirelessly from the Amazon bookstore. E-books, though they had been around for some time, were not particularly popular or viable until the Kindle, and other e-readers like it, caught on. Back in 1992, the Boston Globe wrote about “electronic books coming to a screen near you.” These early e-books required electronic reader devices costing more than $1,000, and the books, on 3.5-inch computer disks (remember those?), could be purchased by mail “at prices as low as $30 apiece.”¹

To encourage adoption of the Kindle, Amazon sold new e-books for just $9.99, much less than the $26 it might cost for a new hardcover book at a superstore (or even the $15-$16 discount Amazon price for the same hardcover title). However, publishers argued that the low price point and flat pricing would be unsustainable as a business model and would diminish the value of books in the eyes of consumers. As publishing moves toward e-books, which don’t need to be printed and bound, the question becomes: How much should a book cost to account for the reduction in production costs yet still compensate authors and publishers fairly?

With the arrival of the iPad in 2010, most major publishers opted to sell e-books with an “agency” pricing system in which publishers would set the prices for e-books (initially in the $12.99-$14.99 range). As agents for the publishers, e-book retailers like Amazon, Apple, and others would keep 30 percent of the book revenue as their sales agent commission, while the publishers would get 70 percent. This split is similar to the division of music sales revenue between recording companies and Apple’s iTunes store. Apple preferred the agency pricing system, and Amazon reluctantly went along.

The pricing model has been controversial. On one hand, the agency model enabled Apple and Barnes & Noble to compete with Amazon on e-book sales, since the publishers set the prices, not Amazon. On the other hand, it was illegal. In 2013, a federal district court judge ruled that Apple and five of the largest publishers “conspired to raise, fix, and stabilize the retail price” for e-books, in violation of federal law. The decision was good news for Amazon, which held a 50 percent share of the e-book market, and could continue to use low prices to undercut other e-book retailers.²

The growing popularity of e-books (Amazon now sells more e-books than print books)³ presents significant questions for the future of books and the book industry. Certainly, our understanding of what a book is—ink and paper—has morphed. In addition to the question of price, there are questions about the role of the publisher. As authors make deals directly with companies like Amazon to release e-books online, what will be the fate of publishers that perform the tasks of discovering authors and developing the books we read? And finally, our idea of a bookstore keeps changing. If most books are sold online, what becomes of brick-and-mortar bookstores, where people browse, meet, and talk about books? Of course, Amazon has competitors in selling e-books, including Apple, Google, and Barnes & Noble, all of which offer more than a million titles that can be read on tablets, smartphones, or computer screens. The future will still have authors and readers, but the business that brings the two together is undergoing enormous change.

IN THE 1950s AND 1960s, cultural forecasters thought that the popularity of television might spell the demise of a healthy book industry, just as they thought television would replace the movie, sound recording, radio, newspaper, and magazine industries. Obviously, this did not happen. In 1950, more than 11,000 new book titles were introduced, and by 2011 publishers were producing over fifteen times that number—more than 177,000 titles per year (see Table 10.1, p. 352). Despite the absorption of small publishing houses by big media corporations, thousands of different publishers—mostly small independents—issue at least one title a year in the United States alone.

Our oldest mass medium is also still our most influential and diverse one. The portability and compactness of books make them the preferred medium in many situations (e.g., relaxing at the beach, resting in bed, traveling on buses or commuter trains), and books are still the main repository of history and everyday experience, passing along stories, knowledge, and wisdom from generation to generation.

In this chapter, we consider the long and significant relationship between books and culture. We will:

As you read through this chapter, think about the pivotal role books have played in your own life. What are your earliest recollections of reading? Is there a specific book that considerably impacted the way you think? How do you discover new books? Do you envision yourself reading more books on a phone or tablet in the future? Or do you prefer holding a paper copy and leafing through the pages? For more questions to help you understand the role of books in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.