What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not
dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books
not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually
began it. They are part of the fuel that drives it. The growth of the
chain model in books offered everyone the opportunity to decry the
groceryfication of the bookstore, utterly belying the reality, as
Striphas outlines in his excellent The Late Age of Print, that the
bookstore is in fact the model for the supermarket:In the history of shop design, it is bookstores, strangely
enough, that were the precursors of supermarkets. They, alone of all
types of shop, made use of shelves that were not behind counters, with
the goods arranged for casual browsing, and for what was not yet called
self-service. Also, when brand name goods and their accompanying
packages were non-existent or rare in the sale of food, books had covers
that were designed at once to protect the contents and to entice the
purchaser; they were proprietary products with identifiable authors and
new titles.There are other examples of significant innovation being driven by the
publishers—Penguin founder Allen Lane’s 1937 paperback vending machine
for better commuter distribution being among the most charming—but the
point is that books aren’t sitting grumpily in economy class on the
airplane to the future. They’re in the cockpit.The PostScript output of PageMaker (later to become the more familiar
“PDF”) undermined the Industrial Revolution model, initiating the
digital, post-Industrial phase of abundance, even though, at the time,
it appeared to be reinforcing the Industrial model by reforming it.
Independent presses could make digital files and send them to offset
printers. They still had to deal with the classic economies of scale of
analog printing, but they didn’t have to deal with the complex,
inaccessible, and arcane world of traditional typesetting. The number of
publishers began to increase, as did the number of titles, as the
creation of a title (by publisher, of course, not by author) became
significantly cheaper and began to undo ever so slightly Vonnegut’s
otherwise accurate analysis of the business of culture. The genius opera
singer needed systems to distribute her genius as broadly as possible,
and the copyright system combined with analog reproduction made that
easy. And it was getting easier for the non-mainstream, too, be that the
lover of the avant-garde, or the early music, or the campy, or the
local, or the familial (the recording of your grandmother singing
opera). The non-mainstream was abetted by the growth of the superstore
model of bookstores. The traditional independent bookstore stocked
5,000–10,000 titles, and so could only handle the new and backlist
output of a limited number of publishers. But a Barnes & Noble or
Borders superstore could have fifty, sixty, or seventy thousand titles!
Indeed, it needed those non-mainstream offerings to fill its shelves.
Ironically, while indie, alternative, and literary presses frequently
decried the predations of the superstores, the superstores were critical
to their existence.