ABSTRACT
This chapter begins to see new kinds of publishing companies, the outgrowth of print-on-demand and the Internet, and they are predicted to cause some upheavals in industry. The new modes of production and dissemination, and the new possibilities these have spawned, have in turn had significant consequences for the relationship between scholars, publishers and institutions. In the old ecology of journal publishing, the scholar worked for an institution which paid a salary. If the general appeal of e-books and e-book readers remains in doubt, there has been nonetheless a revolution in publishing caused by electronic book production. In the Victorian period, Mudie's Select Library owned 50 per cent by a publishers' consortium, not only monopolized the novel rental market but also effectively influenced the form's generic bounds, as well as its readership. The chapter finds ways to distinguish among the many relationships a book can have with the text it contains some of which are more essentially bookish than others.
