If you have the time (and energy) for a cross-curricular case study, this book will provide very useful source material. As the subtitle indicates, it covers the analogue and digital battlefield in the world of books. A case study involving the Computing, English and Economics or Business Studies departments would, I am sure, pay dividends.

As a published and self-published author, I have some experience of being in the thick of these “book wars”. There are so many options available to you. For instance, you might want to try and get published in the traditional way, but negotiate a contract that leaves you with the foreign language rights, which you might want to monetise through a self-publishing route.

Then there are digital books or ebooks, and audiobooks, self-publishing, crowdfunding…. The author himself says that any book like this, that is one written while the thing they’re writing about is still going on, is destined to be obsolete before long. That is, indeed, the fate of this book, written before the advent of Non-Fungible Tokens — although blockchain was already on the scene and seems not to appear in these pages.

Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating book that brings together a number of threads (as suggested above). The author even explores what a book actually is. Apparently, the United Nations defines a book as something with at least 49 pages. So if your typescript comes out at 48 pages, it’s not a book? (You could always increase the font size or the page dimensions if this bothers you!)

Here’s the critical question: why are printed books still around? Hasn’t the death of print been predicted over and over again since ebook readers first came on the scene? The author explains this very convincingly.

If you love books, and are intrigued by the plethora of options now available to you as both a reader and writer, you’ll like this book. Don’t worry that some of it’s out of date, because it provides an historical perspective as well as a broad one.

My only caveat is that while the detail is fascinating, there is perhaps rather too much of it.

I’ve just submitted a review of this book to Teach Secondary magazine, and will be publishing that here after it has appeared in print there.

Update

Here’s the review that was published in Teach Secondary magazine.