The Evolution of the Publishing Industry - the Impact of Vanity Publishing

Publishing industry has a long history, and its impact on human history is unprecedented. It has a reputation of a stable and conservative industry. 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 shape for the whole industry. The purpose of the paper is to present the emergence of the new phenomenon in the studied industry - vanity publishing and present its economic significance. 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. The author of this paper will attempt to study this phenomenon for various stakeholders: vanity presses (a company offering vanity publishing), authors of vanity publications, readers, commercial (traditional) publishers and other authors (mainly from the same literary genre). The primary 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. Such a process, in turn, changes the competitive constraints upon commercial publishers and might lead to some unexpected outcomes for readers. Vanity publishing shifts significantly the balance of power within the publishing industry, which leads to noteworthy changes for all stakeholders.