1.
Running Head: DISRUPTION OF TRADITIONAL BOOK PUBLISHERS
The Disruption of Traditional Book Publishers
Benjamin S Cheeks
International School of Management, Paris, France
Author Note
This paper was submitted to fulfill the requirements of 7039-DSIN – Disruptive
Innovation. I would like to thank Dr. Pezzuto Ivo and my fellow ISM doctoral students for
making the class an interactive and successful learning environment.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Benjamin S. Cheeks.
Email: bencheeks@hotmail.com

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DISRUPTION OF TRADITIONAL BOOK PUBLISHERS
Cheeks, Benjamin S. 2
Abstract
The traditional book publishing business has been slow to respond to changes within
the industry. The growing popularity of ebooks and digital self-publishing are threatening
their business. For years, the major book publishers have effectively outsourced their
innovation to companies like Amazon and Apple. In order to remain competitive, they must
revisit their business model to create a lower-cost lower-overhead model that focuses on
simplicity, convenience, and accessibility. This paper reviews how the technology behind
ebooks has evolved since the 1970s and makes several recommendations as to how book
publishers can respond to this disruptive innovation.
Keywords: disruptive innovation, book publishing, ebooks

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Introduction
For the past 200 years, the book publishing has been a static and predictable process.
Publishers select manuscripts. These manuscripts are edited, set into type, and a well-
produced hardcover printed. These books would be housed in a publisher’s warehouse until
they were sold on consignment through retail bookstores. A year after the release of the
hardcover copy, the less expensive paperback version would be released.
The growing popularity of ebooks and digital self-publishing are threatening this
tradition and ultimately publishers’ business. For years, the major book publishers have
effectively outsourced their innovation to companies like Amazon and Apple.
Since the release of the first Kindle e-reader in 2007, sales of ebooks has surged. By
2011, just four short years after its release, ebooks sales surpassed physical book sales on
Amazon. Released simultaneously to the Kindle, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) is an online
platform that provides authors and small publishers the tools required to publish books of
their own. By 2015, self-published and Amazon published ebooks gained a larger share of
Amazon’s ebook market than that of the Big 5 book publishers. This is significant when you
realize that Amazon controls 75% of the ebook market in the US.
These technologies are disrupting the traditional book publishing business. In order
to remain competitive, they must revisit their business model to create a lower-cost lower-
overhead model that focuses on simplicity, convenience, and accessibility. The potential for
technology to change how we create, sell, and consume books is unlimited, and how the
industry adapts to these challenges will be the key to its survival.
Disruptive Innovation
The concept of disruptive technology was first introduced by Clayton Christensen
(1997) in his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In his research, Christensen found that
industries can be disrupted even if they are following good business principles such as
listening to customers and providing products that appeal to broader markets or higher tiers

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Cheeks, Benjamin S. 4
of existing markets. In other words, doing what they are trained to do, they are paving the
way for their own disruption. This is ultimately the innovator’s dilemma.
Christensen identified two types of disruption that can be represented in a three-
dimensional graph. The first two dimensions are time and performance. At first, entrant
companies establish themselves in lower ends of the market introducing new and often
inferior products. Christensen refers to these as low-end disruptions. The third dimension
is represented as a third axis, as shown in Figure 1. This third axis represents new contexts
of consumption and competition as new value networks are created. Christensen refers to
these as new-market disruptions. A distinguishing feature of new-market disruptive
technologies is that they typically enable a broader population of less-skilled or less-wealthy
people to do something that once required the services of a specialist. In other words, they
enable “nonconsumers” to solve pressing problems.
Figure 1: The three dimensions of the disruption model showing low-end
disruption and new-market disruption (Christensen & Raynor, 2003).
Low-End Disruptions. Low-end disruptions attack the least profitable section of the
customer market. These products are often inferior to the mainstream products, but they
tend to be simpler and more affordable to own. These products are often ignored by the
incumbent as they seen as inferior and they do not threaten their core market. However,

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rapid advances in technology can quickly push these products into the mainstream (see
Table 1 for a summary of the technical advances described below).
Many people believe that the path toward ebooks started with the Kindle. However,
as with many of today’s disruptive technologies, it was the Internet, that paved the road for
electronic books
Key technical advances that led to the success of ebooks. Ebooks were
introduced in 1971 by Michael Hart as a part of Project Gutenberg. Hart’s vision was to
create electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. At first, the
books in Project Gutenberg were only those available from the public domain. They were
created using the low set of ASCII - called Plain Vanilla ASCII – in order to be read on any
hardware and software. Books were created as continuous text files without pages or
chapters. Caps were used for terms in italic, bold, or underlined of the print version. Hart
and volunteers personally typed the books into the computer and made them freely available
(Lebert, 2009).
Needless to say, the publishers likely did not take notice of Project Gutenberg and
ebooks except to protect their copyrights. However, technological advances continued. With
the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989-1990 and web browsers in 1993, readers had
an easy channel to find and download ebooks to be read on their computers. In 1993, Adobe
introduced the PDF (Portable Document Format) and the free Adobe Reader. Now ebook
creators had a professional format to create and share information.
In 1995, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon.com as an online bookstore. At this point,
Amazon.com was viewed by the publishers as just another retail channel.
In 2000, the Mobipocket reader was introduced. From April 2002, the Mobipocket
format and the Mobipocket Reader could be used on any PDA and on any computer. It
quickly became global standards for ebooks on mobile devices.
Lebert (2009) calls 2003 the turning point for ebooks. By this time, more and more
books were being sold in print and digital formats. Thousands of books, mostly best-sellers
were sold as ebooks to be read on the ever expanding number of e-readers. At this time,

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ebooks were either sold at the same price as the hardback or the release of the ebook version
was delayed for up to one year from the release of the hardcopy. This practice was consistent
with the process followed with paperback versions of the books. Publishers did this to
maintain their margins.
In 2007, Amazon released the original Kindle. The Kindle was launched with a
catalog of roughly 90,000 ebooks, each priced at $9.99 or less. The screen used the E-Ink
technology, a paper-like display technology with high brightness and contrast yet minimal
power use (Wikipedia, 2016). Books were bought directly on the Amazon site and
downloaded via the device's 3G wireless connection, with no need for a computer. The large
storage capacity meant that now users could carry with them a full library of books in a
device weighing less than one book. Upon launch, the Kindle sold out in less than six hours
(Patel, 2007).
2010 brought the release of the iPad. The iPad brought to the table an impressive
color display, a fancy bookshelf with iBooks and an easy to use interface. Users could also
read ebooks that incorporated multimedia.
In 2011, just 4 years after the release of the original Kindle, ebook sales exceeded
physical book sales on Amazon. In the three-month period April 2010 to June 2010,
Amazon sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for
which there is no Kindle edition. In June 2010, sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100
hardcover copies (Miller, 2010).
Year Event Comment
1971 First Ebook
available through
Project Gutenberg
Books were only those available from the public domain.
They were created using the low set of ASCII - called Plain
Vanilla ASCII in order for them to be read on any hardware
and software. Books were created as continuous text files,
with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the
print version.
1989 -
1990
Invention of world
wide web
The invention of the world wide web created a channel
through which ebooks such as those on Project Gutenberg
could be accessed.

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Cheeks, Benjamin S. 7
1993 First web browser
introduced
Web browsers made it easier for users to search for and find
books.
1993 Adobe launched the
PDF (Portable
Document Format)
with free Adobe
Reader
The PDF created a standard format where authors could
publish their content in a customizable format and share that
content with other users.
1995 Amazon.com
launched by Jeff
Bezos
Amazon.com was launched as an online retailer selling
physical books. It quickly became the largest bookstore in
the world.
2000 Mobipocket Reader The Mobipocket format and the Mobipocket Reader could be
used on any PDA and on any computer from April 2002.
They quickly became global standards for ebooks on mobile
devices.
2005 Amazon buys
Mobipocket
The Mobipocket format would be recognized as one of the
standard formats for ebooks. The .mobi is still used by
Kindle today.
2007 Amazon launches
the Kindle
The Kindle was launched with a catalog of 90,000 ebooks
and new releases for US $9.99. The original kindle sold out
in less than six hours. 580,000 Kindles were sold in 2008.
2010 Apple launches the
iPad
The iPad and the iBook store allowed readers to enjoy their
ebooks on a dynamic full-color display. It also allowed for
the integration of multi-media with the text.
2010 Ebooks sales
outnumber print
sales on Amazon
Ebook sales exceed physical book sales on Amazon.
Table 1: Key events that led ebooks to become a disruptive technology.
The response of the publishers. With the release of the Kindle in 2007, the
publishers were happy with outsourcing their innovation to Amazon. Publishers had seen
the revenue to the music industry drop dramatically with the advent of digital technology
and were happy that book publishing had not gone through the same contraction. Amazon
handed them a digital revenue stream and the publishers had to make little in the way of

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Cheeks, Benjamin S. 8
investments in technology. However, publishers were never happy with Amazon’s $9.99
pricing. Stone (2013) calls Jeff Bezos’s $9.99 price point a “gut decision” priced after Apple’s
$0.99 price for a music single. Publishers were worried that this pricing would undercut the
pricing of the print books and reduce the value of the product in the eyes of the consumer.
The publishers took a different approach with Apple. Instead of allowing Apple to set
the prices of ebooks, the publishers and Apple went with an agency model that allowed the
publishers to set the prices. Unsurprisingly, this led to higher prices of ebooks in the iTunes
store. It also led to a guilty verdict for Apple, claiming that Apple colluded with publishers to
artificially inflate prices. The publisher demonstrated a strong desire to maintain the
existing favorable price structure for books. The inflated prices for the ebooks allowed them
to “milk” the market for high-priced hardcover versions of new novels before eventually
releasing cheaper versions. Ingram (2015), reporting research by the US Justice
Department, shows the price of a newly released book rose by an average of 24% with some
best-sellers increasing by 40%.
Recently the five remaining publishers have negotiated a similar agency model with
Amazon allowing the publishers to set the price and Amazon to keep 30% of the revenue.
Amazon has responded by adding a disclaimer stating “this price was set by the publisher” to
the sales page of their website (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Screenshot of amazon.com Sales Page highlighting the text “This price was set by
the publisher”. Retrieved 2015, February 28, from http://www.amazon.com.

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While it seems that in the short-term, Amazon has capitulated in terms of pricing, it
remains to be seen how sustainable a pricing model can be that is based upon an alternative
format. That Amazon Team (2014) argues on its website that higher ebook prices will lead to
fewer ebooks sales and less revenue for the publishers and the authors.
As ebooks become a larger part of a book publisher’s revenue stream, they now find
themselves at the mercy of innovators such as Amazon and Apple and can only negotiate for
a piece of the total revenue.
New-Market Disruption. The publishing industry may have larger problems that
determining the price to charge for ebooks. Concurrently with the Kindle, Amazon launched
Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). With this new service, authors could upload their ebook to
the Kindle store and sell directly to consumers. The traditional book publishers were no
longer the sole gate-keepers. Authors and small publishers now had access to sell their
books on the largest bookstore in the world. KDP is one of several popular self-publishing
services. Other services include lulu.com, CreateSpace (also owned by Amazon), Author
House, and Outskirts Press.
While self-publishing has always been an option for authors, the advent of these new
platforms make it easier than ever for authors and small publishers to reach their markets.
More books can be published as aspiring authors are able to by-pass the gatekeepers.
Successful authors with a large following can now easily self-publish their novel and have
access to the Amazon network. Books can be sold for less and the author can still make more
money per book as they bypass the publisher cut.
Digital self-publishing could be the greatest innovation to the book publishing
industry since the invention of the printing press. The threat to traditional book publishers
is real and can no longer be ignored. Recent data (Figure 2) published by
authorearnings.com shows indie and amazon published titles are taking considerable ebook
market share away from the Big Five Publishers.

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Figure 3: Market Share of Ebook Unit Sales by Publisher Type 15 month trend: February
2014-September 2015. Reprinted from authorearnings.com, 2015, Retrieved from
http://authorearnings.com/report/september-2015-author-earnings-report/. Used by
permission under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License.
Digital self-publishing has all of the elements of a disruptive innovation as described in
Figure 4.
1. Sophisticated technology that simplifies – self-publishing websites can assist an
author with services such as editing, cover design, illustration, book reviews, and
ISBN assignment. They can also help distribute your book through Amazon.com and
other book selling sites.
2. Low-cost, innovative business model – authors only pay for the services they use.
Once the book is published, authors do not have to share revenue as they would with
a traditional publisher.
3. Economic coherent value network – self-publishing companies tend to have minimal
in-house staff and outsources services to a group of freelancers. This provides them

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with flexible offerings and lower overhead. They have relationships with major book
sellers that can help ensure placement.
Figure 4: Elements of disruptive innovation (Christensen, 2009).

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Business Model Comparison. Using the business model canvas created by
Osterwalder & Pigneur (2010), one can easily see the difference in the business model of a
self-publishing company and a traditional publisher.
The business model canvas – traditional book publishing. The traditional
model is built upon a selection whereby publishers screen many authors and manuscripts to
find those that are most likely to achieve the minimum sales targets.
Key Partners
• Content
Providers /
Authors
• Book sellers
Key Activities
• Content creation
and acquisition
• Screening authors
• Editing content
• Book printing and
distribution
• Marketing
Value Proposition
• Great content
• Well written
• Relevant and
entertaining to
target market
Finding the best
authors and providing
an avenue for their
work.
Customer
Relationships
• Community
creation
around
books,
authors, and
subject
matter
Customer
Segments
• Many
specific
interest
groups
Key Resources
• Great content
• Relationship with
authors
• Great marketing
Channels
• Brick and
Mortar
Bookstores
• Independent
and large
retailers
• Online
Bookstores
• Big Box
Retailers
Cost Structure
• Content acquisition and editing
• Marketing
• Printing
• Distribution and storage
• Content usage fees
Revenue Streams
• Retail sales (online and brick and mortar)
• Highest margin products are hardcover
books
• Subscription and book club sales

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The business model canvas – digital book publishing. The digital model is
built upon the idea of helping niche and amateur authors bring their work to market. It
eliminates traditional entry barriers by providing authors the tools to craft, print, and
distribute their work through an online marketplace without regard to sales targets.
Key Partners
• Content
Providers
/ Authors
• Book
sellers
• Freelance
providers
of key
services
Key Activities
• Providing
authors with
tools and
resources to
create and
distribute their
work
Value Proposition
• Customizable
platform
• Pay for only
those services
you need.
• Print-on-
Demand
services
available.
.
Customer Relationships
• Community of
service providers to
help you create your
content
Customer
Segments
• Niche authors
• Amateur
authors
• Authors
rejected by
large
publishing
houses
• Authors with
their own
following that
do not need the
backing of a
publishing
house
Key Resources
• Team of
freelancers
Channels
• Primarily online
bookstores, but
many can help you
get placement in
brick and mortar
stores
Cost Structure
• Cost to maintain their platform
• Cost of freelancers – variable and flexible
Revenue Streams
• Fees paid by authors
How should book publishers respond?
Venture Consulting (2015) lists seven traits that companies must have to create or
respond to disruptive innovation. Many of these are applicable to the book publishing
industry.
Recognize the Need for Change. The first is to recognize the need for change. Book
publishers must accept the fact that their current business model will no longer deliver the
value it once did. Artificially inflating prices, merging with competitors or suing other
companies with new technologies is not a long-term path to success.
Behave like Start-ups. The second trait is that disruptors behave like start-ups. There
are barriers to innovation everywhere in the corporate structure. Teams must be created
outside of the core operation. These teams must be given sufficient resources, autonomy,
and room to fail as they try new things and investigate new technologies.

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Be Customer Centric. The third trait is that successful disruptors must be customer
centric. Christensen (2007) believes the jobs concept to be the most intellectual contribution
of The Innovator’s Solution. This concept states that “customers don’t buy products or
services. They hire them to get jobs done in their lives.” The concept suggests that
companies have the greatest chance of success when they innovate to address an important,
unsatisfied customer job.
Publishers must enhance and refine their organizational and management skills, and
re-assess their capabilities and their relationships with other industry stakeholders, not the
least with readers. In doing so, they must create a lower-cost lower-overhead model that
focuses on simplicity, convenience, and accessibility.
As shown in Figure 5, instead of a value stream, book publishers must create a value
web of services around the author and the reading public. They must embrace the power of
new technology to engage the reader in new experiences. The publishers must remember
that they are not just competing with other publishers, but they are competing for their
customer’s time from an ever growing number of sources.
Figure 5: The value stream versus the value web model for book publishers (Overdorf &
Barragree, 2001).

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Some Recommended Actions
Create Digital as a Separate Company. In her interview with Clark Gilbert, a
contemporary of Clayton Christensen, Levitz (2013) states that only 9% of disrupted
companies recover. Of these, 100% created a separate unit to take on the disruption. Book
publishers should establish new groups outside of the organization and give them the
authority, the resources, and the training to take advantage of the ever evolving technology.
This group should be populated with digital natives who are experts in technology. It’s time
the publishers stopped outsourcing innovation to Amazon and Apple and start developing
their own technology.
Learn from the successful self-published authors. Many of the self-published
authors are masters at social media and building a fan following their work. After being
rejected by agents and publishers, Andy Wier released his novel The Martian chapter by
chapter on his website for free. At the request of his fans, he self-published the Kindle
version and sold it for $0.99 on Amazon where he sold 35,000 copies in three months and
started to attract the attention of publishers (Alter, 2014). New authors are using online
tools and technology to create story-telling platforms as they look for new sources of revenue
outside of the traditional selling of books.
Use the Power of the Crowd. Create communities of interest online and give away
sample chapters for free. Focus on features such as interactivity to provide easy ways for
people to share their favorite authors with their friends and followers. This will amplify the
reach and potential engagement with the content. This can help reduce some of the risk
involved in publishing a new author or to a niche market. This will also help create a better
connection between the publisher and the reading public.
Utilize the Power of Technology to Create a Deeper Experience for the Reader.
Digital books allow for a richer experience for the reader. For the most part, the digital
content is the same content as in the print editions. Publishers should utilize their resources
to help authors create a richer experience for their readers by incorporating multi-media into
the material or direct links to supporting material on the Internet. Imagine reading a book

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like The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown on your e-reader and have the ability to link to images
of the paintings and churches he described. Provide additional puzzles, riddles, and games
for readers to play.
Get Closer to the Reading Public. Publishers need to increase their level of
understanding of their market. This means understanding the reader as well as the retailers.
Currently, Amazon and Apple know more about the reader than do the publishers. Losing
touch with the end consumer of your product can be fatal to your business. For years, cell
phone manufacturers such as Motorola and Nokia dominated the market, but they lost touch
with the consumer and were making phones that the phone companies wanted. Apple made
the phone the consumer wanted and Motorola and Nokia were unable to survive. Publishers
must gain a better understanding of how customers are consuming their content and want to
consume content. In other words, publishers must go where their customers are going.
More people are reading books on their smartphones. Publishers must experiment with
different formats and ways of delivering data that take advantage of the way consumers are
using their phones. For example, send an Instagram message with the next two paragraphs
of the book I’m reading. Make it easier for me to read in bite sized chunks.
Sell the Ebook and Physical Book Together. One appeal of ebooks is that the reader
has instant access to the content. Ordering a physical book on Amazon will take at least a
day or two depending upon your location. To satisfy consumer’s need for instant
gratification, For select titles, Amazon began offering the opportunity to download the ebook
version of the book they purchased so that they could begin reading immediately on their
kindle rather than waiting for the book to arrive.

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Conclusion
From its humble beginnings as unformatted ASCII text typed into a computer to
multimedia works read on an iPad, ebooks and digital self-publishing are disrupting the
traditional book publishing industry. Book publishers only have to look across the aisle at
their peers in the music business to see how quickly digital innovations can disrupt your
industry.
The capabilities and processes that made book publishers successful in the past can
be barriers in the future. Instead of working to preserve the existing system, business
leaders must see their industry differently. Business models must change. Legacy costs
must be reduced and new, more flexible cost structures put in place. This paper made
several recommendations for actions that book publishers could take to address the threats
facing them. Most critical among them was the idea of creating a separate venture to lead
their digital initiatives. These ventures must have the resources, autonomy, and skills they
need to success. They must be given the freedom to experiment with different technologies
and ways of doing business. They must have the ability to search for new revenue streams
outside of the traditional book retailing. Very few industries survive disruptions of this
nature, and of those that do, most did so through the creation of new ventures.
How people consume content is changing rapidly and the book publishers still have
time to act, if they do so quickly. The potential for technology to change how we create, sell,
and consume books is unlimited, and how the industry adapts to these challenges will be the
key to its survival.

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