The aggregate demand of published material, both online and offline, is a fixed number. Publishers in today's mass media market face fierce competition; each customer that an online publisher wins comes at the expense of its offline counterpart. To illustrate, imagine the unequal slicing of a pumpkin pie representing market shares that vary in size. The sum of all shares, or 'slices,' adds up to the total client base. Although each publisher already owns a portion of the pie, it still covets those who have a bigger slice. In this zero-sum game, with each new slice that a publisher gains, its pie becomes incrementally larger, while the competition's becomes incrementally smaller. Statistics have shown an upward trend in e-journal subscriptions in recent years, mainly because online periodicals are more frequently updated, cheaper to produce, and accessible everywhere (Greco 2). To that end, the internet has helped many web-based media business increase their market share while simultaneously decrementing those owned by their offline competition. Given their inferiority in cost, channeling, and time-to-market, how do traditional publishers stay in business? In the same way opposing forces in nature result in a state of equilibrium, there is a single overarching mechanism in the publishing industry that is designed to buffer short-term market gains and resist long-term change.

This built-in mechanism in the media business consists of a multitude of socioeconomic factors. We will first explore the economics behind the publishing industry, which includes the horizontal integration of ownership and realizing specific market segmentation, such as textbooks. Then, we will scrutinize the social implications such as conventions, content censorship, and government regulation, and finally, delve in on a specific case of value-added books.

In assessing the economics of the