From the Gutenberg Galaxy Towards a Digital Galaxy - Developments in the Book Industry

Abstract

Without any doubt there is a sustainable transformation of our value creation systems towards a digital economy going on. In a digital economy value creation is based on digitalization of information and related information and communication infrastructures. Since more than three decades we observe a fundamental change of industries based on the utilization on information and communication technologies (ICT). Typical examples are the banking and insurance industry as well as the tourism and travel industry. Since the emergence of the World Wide Web at the beginning of the nineties a broader public is aware of the sustainable changes in value creation. Especially the media industry has been affected. But while the music and newspaper industry has been analyzed in many studies the book industry has been much less in the focus of research. In this contribution we summarize the developments within the book industry through a discussion of several typical cases which we think are highly significant for the developments. Applying a respective framework we then will structure the observations.

Keywords: book industry, publishing industry, digitalization, value creation, digital economy,