The publishing industry: a paradigm of information transfer

The mechanisms that have been developed for the transfer of information from source to user all require significant capital investment. The role of information in society can only be properly understood in a context in which its cost and monetary value are properly taken into account. The development of information technology, and the gradual convergence of previously separate technologies, have tended to emphasize both the cost of the infrastructure of information systems and that of delivering the service to the user. But this is not entirely new. The change, although it is significant and even radical, has been one of degree rather than of kind. As we saw in Chapter 1, ever since the invention of printing, and in a very limited way even before that, there has been an overtly commercial element in the information transfer process. The trade in the printed word is perhaps not the only comparison which could be used as a model for the commercialization of computer-based information service provision, but it is certainly the most familiar. Until very recently print, in all its manifestations, was still the most common and the most important information medium in terms of the quantity of stored information which was uniquely available and the comparative ease of access which it offers. Although print-on-paper is gradually being displaced by electronic delivery, the publishing industry offers many insights into information phenomena which are instructive and will be relevant for some time to come. It is, therefore, with print that we shall begin.

The publishing industry – the producer of books, magazines and newspapers – is merely one part of a larger complex of trades and industries. The size and scale of the operation of individual firms within this complex varies from vast multinational corporations, such as News Corporation, at one extreme, to a small bookshop owned and operated by a single person at the other. Linking these improbable partners is a long chain of supply which provides the route along which information can travel from source to user. Inevitably this chain is continuously subjected to commercial pressures, and the free flow of information itself may sometimes be distorted or disrupted by accident or design.