Authors, Publishers, and Readers in Publishing Supply Chain: The Contingency Model of Digital Contents Production, Distribution, and Consumption

The traditional supply chain of the book publishing industry is changing in terms of the digital revolution in the industry. The first impact was printing plate manufacturers withdrawn from the supply chain; further, the e-commerce techniques improved the logistic system and customer relationship management. Technology did accelerate the effectiveness of the supply chain, but did not change too much the sequences and supply-demand relationships between members in it. For instance, with the publishing products become “virtualized,” the roles of authors, publishers, distributors, resellers, and customers are transforming as a contingent system. A reader can easily perform as an author, and publisher via online bookstores, even blogs or facebook. Therefore, the roles in the publishing supply chain as well as their future practices in producing digital content are the main purposes of this study.Since the past few years, due to the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, the threshold of publishing has been lowered. Everyone has a chance to self-publish his/her own work and become an author. These authors come into contact with their audiences directly, sell books, and become best-selling writers. However, as the new types of publishing are developing, the sales of physical paper books are declining. It causes the supply-demand imbalance in the publishing market. In order to cope with this new publishing wave, how the structure of the publishing supply chain will change? how the suppliers will reposition their roles? This study selects five of the U.S. leading self-publishers (AuthorHouse, BookSurge, iUniverse, LuLu, and Xlibris) as its main research subjects, and constructs a model of digital content supply chain in the publishing industry by applying the grounded theory methodology. The researchers make data analysis and connection of the 13 categories, build self digital publishing supply chain, obtain proposition from the original data by grounded method, and secondly, compares the theoretical framework with the original data and adds supply chain components and literature dialogue, verifies the theoretical framework, to propose a contingency self digital publishing supply chain model.