The (Ir)replaceability of the Author: The Paradox of Authorship in Contemporary Publishing

This article examines the impact of contemporary technologies, media, and broa­der social changes on the author’s role in the publishing value chain and the book communication circuit, asking whether the author is truly becoming replaceable or whether authorship is instead being reconfigured. The analysis combines a theoretical discussion of the platformization of publishing with empirical data from a survey of authors’ satisfaction with the performance of a large general publisher in a small national market between 2023 and 2025. The results show that the author’s role is not diminishing but expanding: it increasingly extends beyond creative work into distribution, promotion, data monitoring, and the economic dimensions of the book. At the same time, authors’ expectations of publishers are changing, particularly in relation to transparency, visibility, and the economic conditions of collaboration. The article shows that these transformations cannot be understood simply as a shift from authorship to content or as a process of marginalization. Rather, they reveal a paradox in which the same platform logic that creates the impression of replaceability simul­taneously reinforces the author’s structural irreplaceability.