The impact of digitization in Spanish scholarly publishers

Abstract

This paper analyzes the impact of digitization on the Spanish scholarly publishing sector. Scholarly publishers are those publishing mainly books of interest to the scientific, academic and/or university community or that deal with scientific disciplines. In Spain, there are currently 673 publishers whose books are classified in disciplines such as Science, Technology, Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences. Currently, this figure of scholarly publishers equals approximately 20% of all Spanish publishers. The present study has two main goals: a) to determine the degree to which digitization is affecting the existing business models in Spanish scholarly publishers and b) to identify the emergence of new business models in the Spanish scholarly publishing sector. To carry out this research, an empirical analysis is conducted by means of surveys sent to a sample extracted from the population of scholarly Spanish publishers, following the criterion of stratified random sampling.

The Digitization in the Spanish Publishing Industry

“…In any case, the weight of e-book turnover continues to be quite low-compared to the rest of the formats, but books on Law and Economic Sciences, included within the Social Sciences category and Humanities [17]. Figure 4 shows the turnover of the Spanish e-book industry between 2009 and 2017, expressed in millions of euros, which meant an increase of approximately 2 million with respect to the figure recorded the previous year.…”

“…Despite the examples of digitization in other creative industries, what is not clear for the publishing one is the model to follow in its digitalization process [7,14,15], notwithstanding that publishing companies will not be impervious to technical change and that, therefore, current publishing ways will be modified in future [8,16,17]. Specifically, many companies operating within have had to face the new challenges posed by all the innovations and technological changes associated with the Internet, the e-book, or print on demand, among others [18,19].…”

Fields Touched by Digitalization: Analysis of Scientific Activity in Scopus

“…Digitalization resulted in novel content distribution networks, such as social networks, which had great power with regard to disseminating content from publishers to a segmented audience. On this topic, the document called "The Impact of Digitization in Spanish Scholarly Publishers" by [56] stands out, which analyzes the incidence of digitalization in the Spanish publishing industry. The current document had two fundamental objectives: The first was to establish the degree of magnitude of the repercussions of digitalization on the Spanish publishing industry, and the second was to identify the presence of recent business models in the publishing industry in Spain.…”

The role of KIBS on digital transformation and technological changes in the Spanish publishing industry

“…Digital transformation and technological change in the publishing sector not only promotes new ways of presenting their contents (Shatzkin 2008) but also favors the development of new business models (Peng 2016), among which can be highlighted: the fragmented content model, the payment for consumption or content on-demand, the subscription model, membership, crowdfunding, gamification, direct sales and self-publishing (Magadán 2017;Magadán and Rivas 2018a). Besides, crowdfunding campaigns in the publishing industry open up their business models to customers, co-creating together with them value propositions (Magadán and Rivas 2019b;Zott and Amit 2010).…”

“…Empirically, several studies have analyzed the impact of digital transformation over publishing business models, considering the disruption of e-books (Carreiro 2010;Ferreira, Miranda and Moras 2018;Katan, Mustafa and Adnan 2018;Magadán and Rivas 2018a), reflecting econometrically about the dilemma between diversification and specialization (Mangani and Tarrini 2017), or focusing on the scholarly publishing sector (Magadán and Rivas 2019b), among others.…”