Digital Age Digital Page

For this month’s blog post I wanted to focus on publishing in the theatre industry. As far as this matter goes, most individual books published in the theatre industry are sold as perusal scripts. Perusal scripts are full in length but have not yet been licensed for a production. While the end goal of these scripts are to be sold into performance productions, licensing fees are taken for every single individual performance. At the end of the day, however, most of scripts written are made in a performance-centered type of mind-set. A new type of publishing for the theatre industry that has come about in the past couple of years is the idea of publishing scripts on a digital platform.

In Kimberly Lew’s article From Stage to Screen: Theatre Publishers Going Digital, she discusses a new trend that has been coming about where publishers are offering their scripts in an eBook format. Lew claims that the first theatrical publishing company to do this was Original Works Publishing (OWP), where they offered many of their titles on Kindle’s platform, as well as some acting editions. OWP explained that in doing this, they cut down on production and distribution costs and were able to put the scripts in their reader’s hands almost immediately after an online purchase. Since the success of OWP’s eBook launch, other theatre publishers have hopped on the bandwagon. 

The idea of scripts being published digitally kind of goes hand in hand with some of my previous posts about how the theatre industry is slowly but surely progressing into this digital age. With the online streaming of performances, and now scripts available by eBook, these are new ways for the theatre world to stay relevant in an age where it seems to be falling behind. It’s a great stepping-stone for the theatre world and it will hopefully help create exposure for several playwrights that want to put their works out there.