Abstract:

Publishing industry has a long history and its impact on human history is unprecedented. It has a reputation of a stable and conservative industry which stems from the fact that the process of publishing a book is not changing significantly. Recently, however, since the birth of the Internet and the digital economy, the publishing industry has become vulnerable to considerable fluctuations. Moreover, other phenomena take place, changing the outlook for the whole industry and consumers. The main purpose of the paper is to present the emergence of the new phenomenon in the studied industry – vanity publishing. A vanity publisher is a company which would publish any book in exchange for a payment from the author and the procedure usually employs little or no selection. This phenomenon can be studied from various viewpoints: a vanity press (a company offering vanity publishing), an author of vanity publication, readers, commercial (traditional) publishers and other authors, mainly from the same literary genre. The paper will also attempt to study economic and social outcomes of vanity publishing in the above-mentioned groups of stakeholders. The main method of analysis in this paper is a case study; the author supplemented it with direct interviews with experts to assess problems emerging from the vanity publishing for various groups of industry’s stakeholders. The main finding is that vanity publishing, becoming an increasingly popular phenomenon, leads to the emergence of a new market within the publishing industry. This, in turn, changes the competitive constraints upon commercial publishers and might lead to some unexpected outcomes for readers. Vanity publishing changes significantly the balance of power within the publishing industry which leads to noteworthy changes for all stakeholders.