Abstract

Cultural and creative industries (CCIs) have excited increasing attention in recent years. Academic literature on the subject has been growing in parallel with the emergence of general reports aiming to support government strategies. Notwithstanding this increasing and comprehensive interest, what is often disregarded is the important matter of the characteristics of R&D management and how technological innovations function in organisational value chains. This issue is particularly underinvestigated in the book publishing sector. Paradoxically, innovations based on technology are often «hidden» in CCIs: actors in cultural industries rarely think specifically about technological innovations, which are perceived to be derived from outside the CCIs. Yet technology plays a key role in the current structure of cultural industries such as book publishing. Given this context, this article aims to retrace the key aspects of exceptional and recent changes to the «secular» book publishing industry due to the Internet and ICT revolutions. The analysis shows that digital technologies are not only regularly appropriated by editorial houses (e.g. e-books and e-readers) but that they should also be regarded as intrinsic industry developments. Nonetheless, publishers continue to play a marginal role, because the primary technologies are derived from outside their value chain, thanks to the involvement of new actors as intermediaries. This phenomenon calls for changes in the traditional vision of the policies and regulation of CCIs.