E-books in the global information economy

Abstract

Little attention has been paid to the role of the e-book in the networked global information economy. This gap in the scholarship is all the more relevant because the world’s largest purveyor of e-books, Amazon, is one of a group of large digital media corporations such as Google and Apple, currently vying for dominance of a global information economy defined by access to user data and driven by surveillance of consumer preferences, and has itself been at the forefront of developing such technologies. This article investigates the role of e-books in a global information economy where the commodification of data, and of users’ social lives and labour, plays a central role in a neoliberal digital capitalism that brings together the philosophies of libertarian free-market economics, populist participatory discourse, new systems of data-mining and digital surveillance and new regimes of private ownership and commodification of the social.