This article explores developments in book publishers' use of social media (SM) as a marketing tool, particularly the rise of customer-focused marketing. Surveying the literature about publishers' engagement with SM marketing (SMM), we argue that discourse modes of publishers' SM practice, and the larger marketing ecologies of which this practice forms a part, have been transformed by contextual changes in the mediascape wherein publishing professionals are implicated through their sustained SMM activities. These changes include the rise of algorithmic filtering and paidfor content on Facebook and Twitter, industry's embrace of data analytics, and the connection between them. The article explores the growing divide between small and large publishers in terms of their financial and cultural investment in data analytics, and concludes that the notion of SM as an equal-opportunity marketing tool in book publishing has proven demonstrably false because of this divide. The authors offer further avenues for much-needed research in this field.

As children’s use of screens increased during the COVID pandemic, their reading of traditional books was affected, a national survey of Australian parents shows. The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Melbourne to compare young people’s use of screens and books in the pandemic. Their online survey of 513 primary caregivers of children aged seven to thirteen around Australia showed that tablet use flourished during the pandemic and that COVID lockdowns influenced book buying and library borrowing in consequential ways for publishing and literature. Many parents believed their children’s use of screens had come at the expense of book reading.

This microstudy of digital disruption in newspapers analyses the book review sections of Fairfax Media’s metropolitan dailies, The Sydney Morning Herald, the Melbourne The Age and The Canberra Times, and how they changed between 2013 and 2017, before the newspaper company merged with Nine Entertainment. Through content analysis and interviews, the study documents how the diversity and variety of the books coverage declined steeply after Fairfax management imposed cost-cutting and review sharing on legacy sections. It also documents the demoralizing experience of journalists working in these sections: decreased resources, increased workloads and no time to innovate. The study elucidates how Fairfax management left its papers’ long-standing, hard-won reputations for cultural authority and literary impact to wither on the vine while it pursued a survival strategy of digital diversification.

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