Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

3 results

  • 3 - An Expanding Market

  • Agnes Gehbald, Universität Bern, Switzerland
  • Book:
    A Colonial Book Market
    Published online:
    16 November 2023
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023, pp 126-173

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 locates books on the market to assess questions related to access. Against notions of books as selected objects in colonial society, this chapter aims to demonstrate their everyday presence in the marketplace. Through examples of careers and stocks of traders, it provides a synopsis of the variety of professions and bookselling ventures in the Peruvian capital. While the urban commerce of books had developed into an established business with a number of specialised booksellers in Lima after the turn of the nineteenth century, the regional trade worked quite differently, relying above all on small and individual commissions sent with muleteers into other parts of the viceroyalty of Peru. A focus on used books for sale and an analysis of book prices combined with wages indicates the affordability of books. At various sites, and especially in cities, reading material had become a ubiquitous and accessible commodity.

  • 3 - The book as a commodity

  • from PART II - ECONOMIC, LEGAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS
  • Edited by Michael F. Suarez, SJ, University of Virginia, Michael L. Turner, Bodleian Library, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 September 2010
    Print publication:
    29 October 2009, pp 83-117

  • Summary

    Commercial ingenuity dominates the history of printing and publishing in Britain in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and in many ways booksellers, but also authors and readers, came to treat the various products of the printing press more as market commodities, more as goods directed to specific audiences. The expansion in literary commerce turned, like all other domestic industries, on the attractiveness of the product. The fundamental determinant of the market for new publications was price, and although it is extremely perilous to do so, one should try to establish the course of the relative price of new books. In establishing a wholesale price structure, the London publishers had to consider the mark-up necessary to make the participation of retailers worthwhile. Bookselling success derived far less from supply-led production than it did from the successful exploitation of cartels and techniques to create the appearance of new markets.