The shadow of the big tech firms, notably Amazon, hangs over publishers and booksellers throughout the narrative in John B. Thompson's Book Wars. Amazon's Kindle released in November 2007 seemed to foreshadow the demise of the print book, although that, thankfully, has turned out not to be the case.

In a text of nearly 500 pages, Thompson, emeritus professor of sociology at Cambridge University, analyses the impact of the digital revolution on Anglo-American book publishing, which he calls "its greatest challenge" since Gutenberg and the introduction of print in the 15th century.

The amount of detail that Thompson provides may daunt some readers, but it is well worth staying the course. Thompson's analysis is supplemented by information from 180 interviews, held between 2013 and 2019, with senior publishing executives and their staff in England and America.

Thompson covers early digitisation projects, notably the Google Library, Project Gutenberg, and the HathiTrust Digital Library - initiatives which brought to the front issues in authorial copyright and publisher rights.

Amazon is Godzilla in today's book world. The UK Publishers Association reported that, in 2020, book sales rose significantly because of COVID lockdowns, with sales up 7 per cent on 2019. But Amazon took nearly 50 per cent of those sales.

Thompson is concerned by Amazon's stranglehold and argues "regulatory policies that were devised for an earlier era of capitalism need to be reconsidered in a new era in which the accumulation and control of information have come to form a crucial basis of corporate power".

In terms of "platform capitalism" and issues of tax minimisation by firms like Amazon, Thompson's calls for an examination of anti-trust scrutiny and taxes on large tech companies, a call which echoes those made at the 2021 G7 meeting.

Thompson recognises that the central tension in modern publishing is "different ways of thinking about content and . . . generating power". The book wars began in earnest, he writes, when Google and Amazon moved into publishers' territory commercialising "the triumph of the algorithm".

Publishing houses fought back by major amalgamations, such as the merger of Penguin and Random House, embracing social media, promoting key bloggers and TikTok influencers. BookTok, a section of TikTok described as "the last wholesome place on the Internet", had registered just under 10 billion views by mid-2021.

Another boom area, and one covered in more depth by Thompson, has been the phenomenal rise of audiobooks in the last decade. Amazon's Audible is allegedly is the largest employer of actors in New York. Thompson notes that the most popular genres are, in orders of sales, crime fiction, SF and fantasy, general fiction, biographies and classic fiction.

Thompson opens his book with the case study of Andy Weir's novel The Martian, which went from Weir publishing it on his website, being listed on Amazon for US $0.99 as an ebook, reaching number one on Amazon's science fiction list, then being printed in 2014 and subsequently filmed with Matt Damon.

Thompson argues the internet has allowed a "democratization of culture", which has allowed writers to reach readers without publishing houses as gatekeepers, but even in this space Amazon plays an important role.

Thompson, because of his emphasis on trade publishing, overlooks the significant rise of open access book initiatives. In 2020, the open access ANU Press registered 5.14 million downloads with its titles accessed in 195 countries. Contrast that knowledge access and dissemination to many high-priced academic books with limited print runs.

I once asked a young ANU academic if she was concerned that her first book was priced at nearly $200 and would be bought and read by few people. She ruefully replied that the priority of university research metrics was more counting the physical publication of the book itself than the effective distribution of its content.

Libraries generally are not allowed to own ebooks but can only license them, often at exorbitant prices.

In Britain, Fundamentals of Corporate Business, published by McGraw Hill, was quoted as £65.99 in print and £528 as a single user ebook. In America, libraries have to pay US $239.99 for time-limited access to David Kahn's The Codebreakers.

Thompson concludes the "digital revolution has made the world of books and of publishing a much more complicated place, with many more players and many more options for both readers and writers". His book certainly covers, with a plethora of detail, the current digital publishing jungle, although clearly recognising the Amazonian dangers lurking within it.