Winner of the OMT Division Best Student Paper Award
In this study, I examine the impact of digitization on content novelty within the US book publishing industry, focusing on the transformative influence of Amazon's Kindle and its digital ecosystem on the production and consumption of creative content. I propose and demonstrate that while digitization has promoted democratization and disintermediation, enabling a wider range of creators to participate in the market and fostering a more direct interaction between creators and consumers, it has inadvertently led to a reduction in the novelty of creative content. In doing so, I theorize the diminished roles of traditional gatekeepers and intermediaries and how a market increasingly driven by algorithmic evaluations and consumer feedback encourages homogenization and reduces differentiation in creative outputs. Employing data from nearly 300,000 original books published in the U.S. between 2001 and 2014, sourced from Goodreads.com, the study utilizes fixed effects regressions and a Difference-in-Differences (DiD) analysis to examine these dynamics. The findings indicate a significant decrease in book novelty post-digitization, with variations contingent upon the size of publishing organizations, authors' status, and genre-specific traits. The results also suggest that while established creators might maintain a certain level of autonomy, emerging and independent creators are more likely to align with prevailing market trends, contributing to the overall decline in novelty. This study enriches the literature on creative industries by providing empirical evidence of the complex effects of digitization on content novelty and shedding light on the shifting landscape of creative production and consumption in the digital age.