Comparing gender discrimination and inequality in indie and traditional publishing.

In traditional publishing, female authors' titles command nearly half (45%) the price of male authors' and are underrepresented in more prestigious genres, and books are published by publishing houses, which determined whose books get published, subject classification, and retail price. In the last decade, the growth of digital technologies and sales platforms have enabled unprecedented numbers of authors to bypass publishers to publish and sell books. The rise of indie publishing (aka self-publishing) reflects the growth of the "gig" economy, where the influence of firms has diminished and workers are exposed more directly to external markets. Encompassing the traditional and the gig economy, the book industry illuminates how the gig economy may disrupt, replicate, or transform the gender discrimination mechanisms and inequality found in the traditional economy. In a natural experiment spanning from 2002 to 2012 and including over two million book titles, we compare discrimination mechanisms and inequality in indie and traditional publishing. We find that indie publishing, though more egalitarian, largely replicates traditional publishing's gender discrimination patterns, showing an unequal distribution of male and female authors by genre (allocative discrimination), devaluation of genres written predominantly by female authors (valuative discrimination), and lower prices within genres for books by female authors (within-job discrimination). However, these discrimination mechanisms are associated with far less price inequality in indie, only 7%, in large part due to the smaller and lower range of prices in indie publishing compared to traditional publishing. We conclude that, with greater freedom, workers in the gig economy may be inclined to greater equality but will largely replicate existing labor market segmentation and the lower valuation of female-typical work and of female workers. Nonetheless, price setting for work may be more similar for workers in the gig economy due to market competition that will compress prices ranges.

John Lawson's "A New Voyage to Carolina": notes on the publication history of the London (1709) edition.

John Lawson's "A New Voyage to Carolina," an important source document for American colonial natural history, was first printed in 1709 in "A New Collection of Voyages and Travels," a two-volume set that also contained travel books translated by John Stevens. Lawson's publishers were leaders in the book trade of early eighteenth century London, and the "New Voyage" is typical of the resurgent popular interest in foreign travel narratives and exotic flora and fauna that began in the late 1600s. The "New Collection" was among the earliest examples of books published in serial instalments or fascicles, a marketing strategy adopted by London booksellers to broaden the audience and increase sales. Analysis of London issues of the "New Voyage" indicates that the 1709, 1711, 1714, and 1718 versions are simply bindings of the original, unsold sheets from the 1709 "New Collection" edition, differing only by new title-pages, front matter, and random stop-press corrections of type-set errors. Lawson's "New Voyage" illustrates important aspects of the British book trade during the hand press period of the early eighteenth century.

Mediating production and consumption: cultural capital and 'cultural workers'.

This paper examines recent debates about the role of what Bourdieu termed cultural intermediaries in the formation and reproduction of the relations of cultural capital. Workers in the cultural or creative industries were given a central place in Bourdieu's schema in the creation of hierarchies of value in the production and consumption of symbolic goods. Subsequent writers about the apparent emergence of a creative economy (Lash and Urry 1994; Featherstone 1991) have given workers involved in the production and distribution of cultural goods a pivotal place in the development of late or post-modernity. More recent work (Negus 2002; Nixon and du Gay 2002) has criticized the validity and coherence of the term as it has come to be understood and called for more rigour in its definition and use. This paper adds to this debate by considering the book trade as a space in which the gap between production and consumption of cultural goods is mediated. It suggests that cultural intermediaries, as cultural workers, are engaged in the reproduction of the cultural aspects of social class by 'shoring up' their insecure position in the relations of cultural capital, rather than simply being the taste leaders of a reflexive modernity.