50 Years of Creative Destruction in the Book World

Everything About Books Has Changed Since 1975, and That’s Mostly Good News

As readers, we’re particularly sensitive to the news that reading is in decline. The stats are real enough, but is the supersized panic actually warranted?

I’m mostly bullish on reading, readers, books, publishing, the whole package. Are reading habits changing? Sure. Is publishing in flux? Naturally. Do babies today come born with pre-installed WiFi for quicker smartphone capture? Not until next year’s model. But readers and reading will survive no matter what’s coming next—in part because books and the book industry are more resilient than we give them credit for.

Photo by Olga Tutunaru on Unsplash

Heraclitus warned us about cozying up to the status quo twenty-five hundred years ago. Never the same river, friends. But if I float the Harpeth where I live tomorrow, it’s more or less the same trip, regardless of how much water has traveled under the bridge since I last looked like an idiot in an inner tube. Everything changes, and yet there are points of familiarity upon which we peg our humanness, regardless.

Reading is one of those pegs for some of us. We develop a lifetime of familiarity with the practice, but that very familiarity makes it hard to see that Heraclitus was right and his insight could (should?) help buoy our cultural confidence.

The book world has changed dramatically in just the last fifty years. But because so much feels the same day to day, it would be easy to miss how much disruption readers, booksellers, publishers, authors, agents, and all the rest have actually experienced.

Whittling Down

When my mom published me in 1975, the major publishing houses sported their founders’ names, in some cases with their family members still on the payroll: Knopf, Scribner, Doubleday. Others could easily be mistaken for law firms: Harper & Row; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; Simon & Schuster. Consolidation had begun the prior decade, but publishing into the seventies was still something of a cottage industry.

Over the next fifty years, however, one house after another was absorbed by competitors or larger media companies. Gulf+Western—the conglomerate that also owned Paramount Pictures—bought Simon & Schuster the same year I made my delivery-room debut. Hello, world! Here’s a copy of All the President’s Men, just out the year before.

Mergers and acquisitions dominated the late seventies and eighties. Bantam, Dell, Doubleday, Random House, Harper & Row, Crown, Macmillan, Zondervan, William Collins, Dutton, and probably others were all gobbled up and metabolized by larger interests, which usually altered the companies radically in the process. At one point SeaWorld was involved.

And all that progressed into the nineties. Start listing the sales by year and it gets confusing in a hurry; you practically need a flowchart to follow it all.

Big companies bought little companies and were subsequently purchased by bigger companies. Debt, restructuring, reversals, and all manner of shenanigans prevailed. Just Google Robert Maxwell if you’re not cynical enough.

As we strode into the new millennium, most readers were too busy reading to notice or care that the publishing firms of yore were increasingly just imprints, sometimes barely more than brand labels, within ever fewer massive corporations. Bertelsmann swallowed Random House in 1998 and then merged it with Penguin fifteen years later, giving us the so-called Big Five that dominates publishing today.

When Penguin Random House tried to shrink that further by buying Simon & Schuster in 2020, it took the Justice Department and the federal courts to stop the sale. Instead, Simon & Schuster went to private equity in 2023. The same thing happened to Thomas Nelson (twice) when I worked there before HarperCollins bought it in 2012. I left in 2013, and my stress level decreased immediately.

The same sort of consolidation played out at the loading docks and retail counters. Mass-market paperback copies of Danielle Steel, Clive Cussler, and Stephen King reached the grocery stores, pharmacies, and transit stations via a network of regional wholesalers who stocked racks, shelves, and spinners all over the country.

In the mid-nineties that whole network collapsed as bigger retail chains tried to serve their needs with fewer suppliers. More than three hundred wholesalers existed in 1995. Only about 50 survived the decade, and the survivors kept swallowing one another until a single company, Levy Home Entertainment—renamed ReaderLink in 2011—stood as the dominant supplier of paperbacks to the big-box and drugstore racks. In the middle nineties, retailers moved more than 500 million mass market paperbacks; by 2024, 96 percent of those sales vanished, and last year ReaderLink stopped carrying them altogether. An entire entry point for cheap, accessible books that defined an industry for more than three quarters of a century is now basically gone.

I came into traditional publishing in 2001, and all these forces were not only underway but playing out hot and heavy in the bookstore environment. I can recall shopping in Waldenbooks as a regular customer, and also as an acquisitions editor seeing books I signed and edited on those shopping-mall shelves. What a thrill! And then they all went out of business. What a bummer!

At least there was still plenty of action at Borders. I worked at a Borders when I was in college, first shelving music and movies (remember VHS?) and eventually most of nonfiction books. But then I had the same excitement of both shopping for new books there and seeing books I worked on sharing the same shelves. And then they went belly up in 2011, and taps played across the land.

This was the tail end of a transition underway since the 1990s as independents gave way to the behemoth chain stores like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million, before the literary leviathan emerged and threatened them all. Jeff Bezos got a bright idea in 1994, and the brick-and-mortar stores that once triumphed over the indies on wide inventories soon found themselves competing with a bookstore not even 40,000 square feet of books could come close to touching. Indies took a drubbing. Numbering more than 5,000 stores in the mid-nineties, by 2009, they were down to sixteen hundred. Amazon threatened to gobble not only the entire dinner but everyone sitting at the table.

I still recall the team meeting at our local Borders in, maybe, 1997 when our manager Lote Thistlethwaite told us selling books online was a risky proposition, and the higher-ups at corporate had decided to take a wait-and-see approach. Didn’t pan out. Borders partnered briefly with Amazon to sell books online, but that only meant they never figured out a business model for themselves and crumbled even faster.

Barnes & Noble was no match for Amazon either. They not only ended up shuttering stores through the late 2010s, but were eventually sold to a hedge fund in 2019. Thankfully, they stabilized under the new leadership of James Daunt. B&N is actually expanding again. And so are the indies, doing better today than they have in the last 20 years.

But that’s just how books got produced and sold. Meanwhile, during these same years, the digital turn transformed the whole passage from a writer’s desk to a store’s cash register.

Going Digital

Start at the desk. For most of literary history the tools were seemingly incidental—pen and paper, then a mechanical typewriter, then an electric typewriter—but then came the word processor. Len Deighton wrote his 1970 novel Bomber on a word processor; they installed it in his house with a crane. But you know about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Computers got smaller, and word processing took off, changing not only how fast a writer could work but even how they thought.

Some were alarmed. In 1984 Gore Vidal said “the idea of literature is being erased by the word processor.” He wasn’t alone. In 1987 Wendell Berry told us all he wouldn’t buy a computer. But that same year Joan Didion took the plunge. It was hard to get the knack at first. “I thought I won’t be able to write anymore,” she told Dave Eggers in Salon. “But you couldn’t go back to the typewriter after using the computer, so finally after about a month I got proficient enough that I could actually work on it without being distracted by it. . . .”

Didion spoke with Eggers in 1996 and by then the machine had changed as well. She was using an IBM ThinkPad and reported that it affected her thought process. “I think my pieces get more and more complex ever since I’ve started using a computer,” she said. “It started making me a whole lot more logical than I ever had been.”

How so? The word processor changed the nature of composition itself: “With a computer it was less like painting and more like sculpture, where you start with a block of something and then start shaping it. . . . You get one paragraph partly right, and then you’ll go back and work on the other part. It’s a different thing.”

It was a different process, but it worked for millions. When I started college in the mid-nineties, I worked on a MS-DOS machine with an amber screen and a dot-matrix printer. My poetry-quoting grandpa felt bad for me and gave me money to buy my first laptop—a Texas Instruments machine equipped with WordPerfect. I not only used it for college papers, but began keeping folders of drafts of all sorts of essays and what I imagined would become chapters in the many books I would write.

Just like Didion said, you could store ideas and come back to them, massage and rework them. Cut and paste, people! What was going to the moon compared to that feat? When I first dabbled in book editing—freelance editing game guides for Prima Publishing in Roseville, California, in 1999—I was then using track changes. As far as editing went, that was going to Mars. (Prima, for what it’s worth, was bought by Random House in 2001.)

Computers changed everything about books through the eighties, nineties, and beyond. For instance, however the writer came up with those words, the manuscript still had to become a physical object, and there the changes were just as thorough. When I was born in 1975, a book had to be set in type by a compositor, proofed in galleys, and assembled into pages by hand, literally cut and pasted onto boards that a camera shot to film. Wax and rubber cement were involved.

By the time I was ten, “desktop publishing” had arrived. Aldus PageMaker, Apple’s LaserWriter, and Adobe’s PostScript hit the scene close enough together to spark a new coinage from Aldus’s Paul Brainerd. Then we got QuarkXPress in 1987, and typesetting and page design made the compositor’s analog tools museum pieces. By the time I started editing for a salary in 2001, Adobe’s InDesign, already around for a couple of years, was fast becoming the dominant tool of page designers. At the turn of the millennium, a book could be written, edited, and designed entirely on screen, but even the production process was being transformed.

In the late 1990s my dad and I started a little publishing enterprise, and I still recall sitting over the shoulder of our page designer as he typeset the book in Quark. I also remember proofing “blues,” the last checkpoint before a book went to press. The printer took the film negatives used to burn the plates, set them against light-sensitive DuPont Dylux paper, and exposed them under a bright lamp. The paper turned blue wherever ink would eventually land—an analog proof of the printing plates.

That whole process was headed to the dustbin. You can still hear people use the phrase “blues” the way we “dial” a phone, but by the early 2000s, pretty much everyone was using PDFs.

Everything up to the point of ink on paper had gone digital, but even that was being changed. In 1990 Xerox debuted the DocuTech, a machine that could print and bind a single book straight from a digital file. Somewhere along the line, John Ingram, who ran the book distribution company founded by his father, spied a DocuTech at a trade show and realized its potential. Ingram founded Lightning Source a few years later in 1997 and began producing print-on-demand books in 1998.

The quality was pretty shoddy in those days, but it started pressure toward developing the high-quality, short-run printing commonplace today. The technology revolutionized everything from inventory to book contracts, where authors, agents, and publishers found themselves at odds as to what counts as going “out of print.”

And so far I’ve said nothing of the internet or the web. I had few paths to break into publishing in the late 1990s outside paths I made for myself. I knew I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to get into publishing—hence the little hobby house my dad and I started, also hence the little webzine I launched in 1997.

Word processing and web publication are the only reasons I’m writing this right now. The digital transition made everything possible, and it revolutionized the entire publishing landscape, not only who was writing but the avenues for publication.

I’ve already talked in another piece about the changes to the traditional book review in venues like newspapers and magazines. Love it or hate it, that’s the world the electrons made. All of that was percolating in the nineties, developed in the aughts, and then blew up in the teens with the advent of social media. Goodreads launched in 2007, bought up by Amazon in 2013. Facebook and Twitter did their thing, and then TikTok gave us BookTok.

And since this is a business—or at least tries to be—let’s not forget the cash register. For most of the century, nobody outside a given publishing house knew how many copies a book had actually sold. That ended in 2001, when Nielsen BookScan started reading sales straight off the scanned barcodes at checkout. Suddenly every editor, every agent, every competitor could see exactly how an author’s last book had done. Metrics took over publishing.

As I personally know with a wince and shudder, an author’s BookScan numbers became their acquisitions credit score. When an editor signs a book today, they’re curious about the content of the book, sure, but they’re really looking at the author’s platform and previous sales history—two features almost entirely dependent on the digital revolution.

But then, who needs editors? In 1975, self-publishing was called vanity publishing and considered about as disreputable as having an aunt who worked as a prostitute. The digital revolution changed that as well. Now major publishing houses have arms that help facilitate self-publishing, and there are countless platforms and services, including hybrid publishers, to help aspiring authors get their books into readers’ hands. And, of course, thanks to the digital revolution books don’t even have to take physical form.

The dream of books on screen is older than me, far older if you go back to Vannevar Bush in the 1930s and 1940s. But we don’t need to go that far back to see the recognizable pieces of the current picture. Project Gutenberg started turning public-domain texts into digital files back in 1971. It took a lot longer to get e-readers. The clunky Rocket eBook turned up in 1998, the Sony Reader in 2006, and then the device that finally stuck—because it was attached to a massive distribution channel—Amazon’s Kindle, in November 2007, with Apple’s iPad and iBooks close behind in 2010.

For a few years the trade braced for print’s funeral. Nicholas Negroponte, who founded the MIT Media Lab, told a conference in 2010 that print books would be goners inside five years (“the physical book is dead”). Ebook sales climbed fast, but sales leveled off somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the trade and have more or less hovered there ever since—a serious slice of the business, but a companion to print rather than its executioner. The two formats coexist so peaceably today no one even worries about it.

Then there’s audio. Books on Tape was founded the same year I started listening to anything, 1975. The company put novels on cassettes for the commuter and the long-haul driver. Audible followed twenty years later in 1995, got swallowed by Amazon in 2008, and carried the format from tape to compact disc to download to streaming.

Working at a used bookstore before jumping to Borders, I had easy access to plenty of books on tape and CD. I listened to quite a few P.J. O’Rourke titles that way—all abridged, as it happened. Abridgment was common for books on tape and CD because of space considerations, though some books were published complete. My brother-in-law had a copy of The Lord of the Rings on tape; it came in a wooden crate. I also remember being asked to proof the unabridged audiobook for Bill Bennett’s America: The Last Best Hope, Vol. 1, which my team published in 2006—twenty-something hours of picking up kids and running errands to get to the end of it.

And people loved it all. Somewhere in that migration, listening to a book stopped being a niche pastime for people stuck in traffic and became the fastest-growing corner of the entire industry, posting double-digit gains year after year. Spotify folded audiobooks into its subscriptions in 2023, importing the all-you-can-stream economics that had already remade music.

Production costs for audiobooks fell along the way, meaning more and more books could be affordably produced, and AI narration will flatten costs further. Whether you take that as a marvel or a misery, it’s here.

That’s not the end of it. Thanks to Heraclitus we know there’s never an end to it. Joseph Schumpeter had another term for this: creative destruction. As we deal with the disruptions, we focus on the destruction part of the phrase. But we often overlook the creative aspect.

When it comes to the book world, there’s been tremendous creative destruction over the last fifty years—just my lifetime. But most of it has been for the good, despite all the cries of doom and disaster along the way, and like floating down the river most of us don’t even recognize how different it all is unless we stop to think about it. As readers, we take all the gains and just keep reading without much regard for, or even awareness of, all that’s changed. Meanwhile, we have more access to more books in more formats than ever before.

Are there developments worth worrying about? We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t find them, and AI provides plenty to fret about. Almost amusingly, the majority of us are doing so on platforms that barely existed—if at all—more than a decade ago without any regard for what those platforms displaced or unsettled when they arrived.

But if there’s one thing our recent history in book land shows it’s that we can absorb a lot of change and keep turning pages all the same.

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