The book trade is a commercial enterprise, using division of labor for the production, distribution, and consumption of books. This means industrial efficiency. But this is not cost-effectiveness in purely economical terms. During all stages, there are strong elements of quality control, where different agents, wholly or partly independently of each other, use selective and editing powers. Traditionally, the book trade outwardly seems a comparatively languid business, often taking a full year to turn a completed manuscript into a printed book.
Initial investments are high and the middlemen are many.
But now, technological changes seem to hold the promise that the industry of literature can be organized in new ways, leapfrogging middlemen and reducing costs at one fell swoop. In the age of digital production, the old professional functions remain vital, but are combined in new ways. Most typically, the author acts as publisher, manufacturer, and distributor when he or she makes a work public on the Internet by storing it on a server that is linked to other computers. Obviously, all these enterprises can be described as systems of functions, combined in their own unique ways, but still showing a family resemblance with each other, as well as with functional structures in traditional institutions outside the Internet. In the digital environment, publishing takes different routes depending on whether the emphasis is on manufacturing, marketing or publishing.