Abstract

The general aim of this research is to validate the hypothesis that the book and its industry, as an integral part of cultural industries, have economic–social characteristics that differentiate them from other industries and merchandise. Once this statement has been corroborated, it is considered that this fact should be taken into account by the academic community, professionals, companies, and those responsible for public administrations when it comes to equating, subsuming, or assimilating the book industry with respect to the creative industries, content industries, entertainment industries, media economics, or copyright industries. The process followed to validate the hypothesis is structured around three objectives: (1) to analyze the main attempts at economic modeling of culture developed over the last 25 years, and how these contemplate the categories of cultural industries and the book industry; (2) to determine by comparison the main socioeconomic characteristics of the cultural industries; (3) to establish in an original way the socioeconomic characteristics of the book industry. For this research, an inductive–deductive method based on three qualitative tools was applied over 29 months (April 2019 to August 2021), including (1) the review, analysis, systematization, and extraction of relevant information through an inductive process of purposefully searching the main sources relating to the objects of study, (2) the establishment of a group of 28 experts who anonymously and systematically debated the different phases of this study in three stages, and (3) in-depth interviews with 43 experts from and on the book industry.