Books and other media

Abstract

This chapter tells how in the twentieth century it was to the book industry that the film, radio, television and later media industries turned for stories, scripts, ideas, formats and all forms of creative content. The visual culture which arose in the nineteenth century became the inspiration for the new industries. Graphic magazines with their lithographs and etchings were the first visualisations of characters and storyline and sometimes formed the source material for the mis-en-scene of the silent movies. The new developments in radio, film and tlevision opened up larger audiences for authors and added to their potential revenue streams. As subsidiary rights proliferated through the growth of new media formats, authors set up companies to control and exploit their intellectual properties. While the BBC sought to avoid direct competition with the book trade, the trend in other media companies though the century was through acquisition to exploit its content across media. So the electronic media appropriated the book’s core values taking access to education, information, and entertainment beyond the walls of the library or schoolroom into the living room as the television set, and then the personal computer, entered the home. Yet the book retained its status and at the end of the century book publishing in Britain remained an essential part of an interconnected communications system for the commodification of ideas and cultural expressions.