The first half of the nineteenth century saw dramatic changes in the economics of the printed word in both the United States and Europe, though the changes generally happened earlier and on a wider basis in America. In the 1830s and 1840s, sharp reductions in prices for newspapers and books in America highlighted the advent of an era of cheap print Now there were daily newspapers that instead of 6 cents per copy sold for a penny or two. Now there were novels that instead of an earlier price of $2 sold for 25 cents or less, when the same books in Britain cost the equivalent of more than $7. So steep were the declines in the price of print over so short a period that they amounted to an information-price revolution, the first of several such episodes of declining prices that have profoundly affected information and culture during the past two centuries. Two mid-nineteenth-century American cultural innovations, the "penny press" and the "dime novel," were actually named for their low price These were criticized for being cheap in both senses of that word low in price and low in taste But low price did not necessarily mean lowbrow increasingly, book publishers issued even the most esteemed works in cheap as well as expensive editions to reach as wide a public as possible. The information-price revolution also affected religious and political publishing, as reading became a basis of mass persuasion for the first time in history.

Cheap print was not entirely unprecedented. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and France, cheap collections of stories, ballads, and other miscellany had circulated among the lower classes. But since only a minority of the poor could read, most listened while a few read aloud; thus cheap print reached not so much a reading as a listening public. The expansion of cheap print in the nineteenth century in America and Europe was on a much larger scale, and仆 took place during a great increase in popular literacy. Together these amounted to a cultural watershed Traditionally, even in literate homes, books and other publications had been relatively rare and treasured obJects; reading meant returning to a few texts, especially religious works. But with the explosion of print, reading became more varied, and readers scanned newspapers, magazines, and cheap books that they soon passed on or discarded. Intensive reading of religious and other works did not disappear, but reading became an increasingly common form of diversion as well as devotion.

The usual explanation for the rise of cheap print emphasizes new technology. Unquestionably, the full development of cheap print could not have happened without technological change. Print, however, had already become cheaper in America before technological advances played a significant role; new technology arrived once the process was under way, not at the beginning. This was no accident: the continuing expansion of print created an incentive for technological innovation. To conceive of technology as the causal force is to understate the prior importance of politics, culture, and markets in creating the conditions that allowed investments in new technology to pay off.

Cheap print was public policy in America. While European governments taxed newspapers and other publications, the United States let them go tax free and even subsidized them, to a degree, through the postal system. The rise of cheap books and other forms of cheap print in the United States also reflected distinctive patterns of nineteenth­century American consumer markets. As the economic historian Nathan Rosenberg remarks, citing the cases of cutlery, guns, boots, and clothing, "Americans readily accepted products which had been deliberately designed for low cost, mass production methods" at a time when handmade goods persisted in Britain Books fit this pattern. Americans had not been primarily responsible for introducing new manufacturing technology to the production of books. On the contrary, most of the key advances in printing and papermaking before 1850 had traveled west across the Atlantic rather than the reverse. But the industrialization of book production proceeded more rapidly in the United States, where the market by the middle decades of the century was not only larger than in Britain but also apparently more sensitive to price than to quality, perhaps because elite readers constituted a smaller proportion of book buyers.