Paper books in a digital era: how conservative publishers and authors almost killed off books in university social science

For more than 15 years, books available only in paper form have fought a losing battle with digitally-available articles in academic journals – the publishing equivalent of horse cavalry repeatedly charging barbed wire defences with machine guns. As their usefulness and effectiveness waned, so the intellectual status of books in the social sciences declined strongly. In the first of a two-part blog post, Patrick Dunleavy traces the declining role of books that reached a nadir in 2010. Part 2 of the argument explores the second coming of books in digital forms.