Introduction: the impact of the digital revolution

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in the 21st century we are witnessing a revolution in communication unparalleled since the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. As in the 15th century, however, there is a time lag between technical innovation and the impact on society of changes in the distribution and publishing of scholarly knowledge. Initially, the first printed pages of incunabula replicated the physical layout of manuscripts, and in the same way digital journals and books have remained influenced by historical print and research assessment frameworks.

In the monastic scriptorium, the dissemination of knowledge was limited by the productivity of the output of the scribes and by public accessibility to appropriate libraries or personal collections. Books generally impacted little on the general public, for whom oral transmission (perhaps now called social networking) was the norm for conveying knowledge and gossip. With the introduction of movable type, these access limitations were overcome quantitatively, although it was probably not until the second half of the 19th century that the mass of the reading public and the print world significantly coincided. By the 19th century, books were no longer individually crafted works of art, but products of industry in a variety of formats (Battles, 2009).

E-books, by which one means the text rather than the device, are another significant variant in the evolution of book publishing and distribution. As Siracusa (2009) contends, an issue ‘is right there in the name: e-book.