“Merchants of Culture” and Digital Book Publishing

Abstract

The review of the Russian translation of the book of the British sociologist John B. Thompson “Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century”, published by the “New Literary Review” in Moscow 2023 in printed and electronic versions is presented. The article discusess main special features and tendencies of development of digital book editions. Among the main ones, by Thompson’s opinion, are: simple access, updating, scale, possibility of search, portability, flexibility, low price, intertextuality and multimediality. The reviewer adds to them three ones more: compactness, independence and ephemerality proving this assertion. The paper reveals both the common features of the digital book publishing in Russia and in the West and the national specific characters in this sphere.