Conservatism in an Innovative Field: Children's Digital Books in Sweden

The study intention is to understand the nature of digital publishing for children
in Sweden and showed, among other things, that digital publishing to a large extent
is reproductions of print books. The paper argues that results of the case study
can be explained by long-time structures in publishing of print books for children
but also that there are barrier breakers.
In order to map digital book publishing for children data was gathered from a
number of sources and covered digital children’s books published in Swedish
2015–2018. The preliminary results of the study points towards severe gaps in
the statistics of children’s digital books and digital publishing in general. Despite
the lack of exact statistics observations can be made on the nature of the digital
children’s book market in terms of publishing formats, development, publishers
and distribution.
The results of this study showed a print-based publishing structure of digital
books. I argue that this contradiction can be explained by five factors: publishing
as a business, copyright, production, authors and audience. These five are linked
but provide different perspectives and explanations.