This paper interrogates and situates theoretically from a Marxist perspective various aspects and tensions that inhere in the contemporary academic publishing environment. The focus of the article is on journal publishing. The paper examines both the expanding capitalist control of the academic publishing industry and some of the efforts being made by those seeking to resist and subvert the cap...

Supported by the wide diffusion of mobile technologies, internetbased media risk to become a popular alternative to traditional print media. The ubiquitous connection to the internet enables to reach a multitude of virtual contents such as videos, images, 3d representations and hypertexts. Moreover internet-based media enable the direct interaction between user and publisher: the user can provi...

We trace the evolving social positions of the people who found new enterprises over the course of industry history. Sociological theory suggests two opposing hypotheses. First, pioneering entrepreneurs are socially prominent individuals or those from related industries while later entrepreneurs are from an increasingly broad range of social positions. Second, the earliest entrepreneurs come fro...

This paper addresses new questions around media performance as a result of the rise of centralized content portals such as iTunes or MySpace. We first describe the rise of centralized content portals in different media industries, and discuss how these portals are creating a dominant position for themselves by using lock-in strategies. Then we describe the concept of media market performance, a...

Analysis of the mechanisms of knowledge accumulation that are employed by firms is a key to understanding the success of certain regions, and also of some industries and firms. This paper: proposes a general framework for the firm’s organisational learning dynamics provides empirical evidence of the organisational learning dynamics that actually appear in firms from the software publishing indu...

This paper analyzes two-sided competition in the video game industry. Video game platforms compete for software publishers and gamers and may invest into in-house publishing of own software (games) before they enter competition. Such investments affect the strength of the indirect network externalities between gamers and publishers in equilibrium. If publishers multihome, i.e., if they can rele...

Large, data-rich organizations have tremendously large collections of digital objects to be “repurposed,” to respond quickly and economically to publishing,marketing, and information needs. Some management typically assume that a content management system, or some other technique such as OWL and RDF,will automatically address the workflow and technical issues associated with this reuse. Four ca...

We study the distribution dynamics of the demand for books in Italy. We find that for each of three broad sub-markets in which the book publishing industry can be classified − Italian novels, foreign novels and essays − sales over a three-year sample can be adequately fitted by a power law distribution. Our results can be plausibly interpreted in terms of a model of interactions among buyers ex...

Scholarly publishing is concerned with the distribution of scholarly information through journals and conferences and other information media. As such scholarly publishing can be understood as a specific part of the information industry. With the advent of advanced information technologies many possible technologically enabled futures have been posited for scholarly publishing. This paper descr...