One thing not mentioned in this article, and which doesn't seem to be discussed much these days is how the tax law changed to essentially eliminate the backlist

One thing not mentioned in this article, and which doesn't seem to be discussed much these days is how the tax law changed to essentially eliminate the backlist (which was unsold copies of a book from the initial print run stored in a warehouse). Time was, an initial print run would be quite large, and books would then be stored and taxes deferred until they were actually sold --- when the law changed, requiring that taxes be paid on unsold inventory each year, these warehouses became a tax liability and the remaindered book market was vastly inflated (previously, it was only those books which had been returned to a publisher and which were not suited to be sold as new) --- one slim text from a religion class I took in college was marked up with a series of price increases as each previous year's taxes were added to the price of the book each year for the inventory which went unsold, finally arriving at $76 from an initial price of $35 or some such from the previous time that course had been taught. Probably, much of the damage/pricing pressure of this was taken away by the savings of digital book production --- consider that previously, to publish a book a publisher would: - typeset a hot metal copy using a Monotype or Linotype composition machine to create galleys - cut those up and do paste-up to create a pagination - photograph the pasteups to create a negative which was then used to make a printing plate Usually, the negatives would be stored and re-used for a reprint (or modified to make corrections), hence books of this period noting that they had been "Typeset and printed from new film"). The freedom of digital imposition has also made the huge expansion of book subjects and treatments possible --- math used to be termed "penalty copy" and required specially-trained compositors who would typeset what could be set on hot-metal machine, then source the balance of the characters required from a drawer in a case, if need be, modifying spacing material w/ a saw, then pull a proof to make a negative as before.