The Role Of Books During The Industrial Revolution

The numerous technological innovations of the industrial revolution changed the very fabric of society. As the steam powered printing press became common place in the realm of book making, books could be made far easier and cheaper than what had before been able. Though this changed the face of book production, a more subtle change came about in the process of book consumption and distribution throughout the mid- to late nineteenth century. Rail began to dominate the American countryside, first being common place in the northeast and then moving steadily into the southern and western regions. Though the emergence of the railroad system in America did not necessarily mean a ‘democratization’ of reading into the masses, railroads did allow for
As peddlers traveled to areas where they knew the market would be rife with the book-buying public, they would bring with them examples of books from the publisher to show. If someone wished to buy a book, they would put in an order form, called a subscription. Then, the peddler would send this back to the publisher. Due to transportation costs as well as the threat of possible damage, the variety and number of books that could be brought with the peddler were small and relegated mainly to the basics. In order to reach a larger public, some publishers dabbled in the correspondence system of distribution, which would allow “distant publishers to bring out books jointly [with the press] in their local area” (Zboray 58). These two systems still held limits for publisher’s amount of distribution, which, again, mainly were predicated on the poor transportation infrastructure. Communication and the ability to send books to potential buyers was fraught with risks. In fact, for parts of the year, the market would shut down due to the weather, as waterways were closed down or froze over. Due to lack of reliable transportation, the type and amount of books that could be sold was limited to a few items such as the Bible, almanacs, and others that were known to always have a steady
However, it should be noted that books were not steadily disseminated to the public in a predictable way. Publishers still advertised and sold books based on regional differences. In part this was due to “the uneven development of the national rail system” which “introduced strong geographical biases into the distribution system” (Zboray 66). The rail system slowly reach the south, but for the sake of books distribution there, the South “shows what book distribution might have been nationally without the railroad” (Zboray 67). There book sales went up far slower than in the areas where the rail system was heavily introduced. Consequently, it cannot be stated that the rail system revolutionized the reading public of America dramatically after the 1850s. Instead, it is important to look at the communities and regional areas in which rail was introduced to see the slow, and at times fast, transformation over a period of