In this fascinating volume, Curtis tells of the radical transformations within the publishing industry over the past several decades: the transition from mass market paperbacks to trade paperbacks; the absorption of hundreds of independent publishers into a few publishing conglomerates; the growth of behemoth bookstore chains and their superstores and their subsequent collapse as Amazon began to dominate the industry; the rise of e-books and audio books; the changes in manuscript submission and distribution procedures with the rise of the internet; the effect of e-books and print-on-demand technology on independent publishing; and the devastating impact of artificial intelligence on the creative arts. He alternates between a historical account of these changes and a memoir of his own experiences as an agent and publisher. His perspective as a publishing insider and as an advocate for writers makes him well-qualified to tell this story.

His account of this tumultuous era in the book business clarified for me some of the background to what I was going through in my own experiences as a writer from the mid-1990s to the present. After a hiatus of almost two decades, I started writing again when my young family settled in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first I had to type up my stories, print them out, and send paper copies to markets in the States and the U.K. When they sold, I would receive paper checks in the mail. Later, when we got our first internet connection with a noisy modem that hooked up to our phone line, I was able to forego the paper copies and send digital stories to editors electronically. Still later, after Amazon set up the CreateSpace print on demand self-publishing platform, I studied blog posts and how-to books by pioneers such as Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch and learned to publish my own books. During this time I was aware of the changes the publishing industry was going through, but I was far removed from it, at the eastern edge of Europe, and could only catch snippets of the background details.

Digital Inc served me up a whole heap of nostalgia, as I was reminded of those challenging days when I was selling my first stories and publishing my first books. It clarified for me some of the history I only obscurely realized back then due to my perspective from overseas. It also brought back a lot of fun memories of those exciting times.

The most valuable aspect of this book for me personally, though, is Curtis’s lucid explanation of what transpired during those tumultuous, uncertain years. It is helpful to be able to put it all in perspective as a writer and a hybrid publisher and to perceive at a deeper level where the publishing industry is today and how it got that way. The wild card at present is, of course, the intrusion of AI into a field that relies heavily on human creativity. Near the end, Curtis mentions lawsuits that creators have brought against the owners of large language models for copyright infringement, but some of these suits are still pending, so the book leaves this topic hanging. All in all, though, Digital Inc is a well-written, well-organized study of the modern book industry, and I recommend it to both writers and readers – to anyone who comprehends the inestimable value of books.