Publishing Power Is Now About...

Digital Distribution and, Yes, Books Too.

A mimeograph machine. That was then..

There were more than four million books published in the United States in 2025 with an ISBN identifier, an increase of 32.5 percent over 2024, according to statistics compiled by Bowker, which tracks such data.

For all those who say that book publishing is dead, dying, deteriorating, or about to be overwhelmed by AI: clearly not yet.

What it does mean is an amazing democratization of how to be an author. Because most of the increase was in self-published books, for which the number of print and ebook versions rose to 3.5 million in 2025, from 2.5 million in 2024.

What used to be dismissed as “vanity” publishing (and still often is) has become a large and lucrative business, with a number of ways to publish, from a handful of copies to bestseller numbers, supported to one degree or another by the authors, financially and in spreading the word.

A bit more about the numbers to make sense of them. The total number of books published in traditional ways rose by 6.6 percent, to nearly 650,000; half of those had BISAC codes, which classify the categories, such as fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and self-help, to be sold, placed in libraries, and entered into databases to be searched.

So what does all this activity really mean in practice?

First, major commercial or trade publishers are increasingly being led by experts in technology, digital distribution, and data, with the books themselves acquired and edited by employee professionals.

In February I hosted a conversation with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster. Karp started his publishing career in the 1980s as an editorial assistant at Random House earning $17,000 a year. He rose through the editorial ranks to become a publisher and then a chief executive.

After a lengthy search Greg Greeley was named to succeed Karp at Simon & Schuster. Greeley worked for nineteen years at Amazon, in the distribution divisions of that enormous enterprise. “He and his teams pioneered print-on-demand publishing, launched the company’s self-publishing platform, and expanded the company’s global audiobook and books marketplace capabilities,” the corporate press release said.

I recently wrote a piece extolling Gayle Feldman’s new biography, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, about the co-founder of Random House. The current CEO of what is now called Penguin Random House is Nihar Malaviya; his official biography says that he has “spearheaded the creation of a variety of industry-first capabilities in data science, supply chain, technology, and consumer insights.”

What do these executives know about the actual books?

Doomsayers will say that the companies see books as essentially roughage to be churned out, with minimal regard for content and quality.

Let me offer a different view. Books are commodities that people have to want to buy and read. It is the editors and publishers who acquire books and develop them into forms ready to be sold. Expertise in data and delivery makes the books more visible and accessible. Sure, crap will sell — it always has — but so will quality when consumers can find the books in the heaps that are appearing, in a format they want to read them.

Effective marketing a book from a single copy to millions is designed by people, assisted by the advances, for better and (alas) worse, in technology.

My belief has always been that the way to publish books well is to know who their prospective readers will be and then make sure they realize the book is available. Visibility and discovery are core to the process of reducing the enduring complaints of “I can’t find that book anywhere.”

What, then, is self-publishing in 2026, the overwhelming majority of those four million books last year?

The concept is still largely misunderstood. Explaining it fully requires much more than a post like this one. I can summarize it as follows: An author who writes a book finds a partner to render it in printed or digital form, with the costs partly or wholly carried by the writer. Self-publishing is not an author cranking out on a mimeograph machine or whatever today’s equivalent would be.

I am often contacted by friends (and some surprisingly notable acquaintances) who want to write a story, a memoir, a novel, a biography, or to share their experiences and expertise. This is a model I think can work for just about anyone:

Self-publishing in digital-only formats has its own infrastructure costs and reach, like the one developed at Amazon by Simon & Schuster’s new CEO. I know less about it other than that it delivers a finished text.

Books in print are still, for the majority of authors and readers, the preferred option.

Politics and Prose, a very popular bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., which I have written about before, has a service called Opus that offers a number of ways to publish a book at a base cost from $600 to $1,200, depending on what level of support the author wants, plus the cost of printing each copy, set by the page count and number of illustrations, with hardcover and paperback binding options.

Upheaval in book publishing aligns with the many other dizzying ways in which technology impacts our life and times. The reasons for concern, or even alarm, are apparent and emphasized.

The flip side is that if you want to write and publish a book, now you can.

Go for it!

***********************

Matty (never Matthew) Goldberg, a good friend and esteemed member of the book publishing community, knows more about music than, I’m guessing, anyone you know. Every year he curates and sends out a playlist to his community. These are invariably excellent. He is now starting a Substack about music (about damn time!), and here is the subscription link.