From NBN to Kindle: How One Small Publisher Lived Through the Transformation of Book Distribution

The technological transformation of an industry can look obvious in retrospect. It rarely does while you are living through it. My own experience publishing books spans several distinct eras of book distribution. I began when getting a book into the hands of a reader required participation in an elaborate physical distribution system. I later sold printed books through Amazon, eliminating much of that traditional chain. Eventually, I stopped producing physical books altogether and distributed ebooks through Kindle.

I was not deliberately trying to demonstrate the evolution of the publishing industry. I was simply using the most practical distribution system available to a small publisher at each point in time. Looking back, however, the progression tells much of the story of what technology did to publishing.

1992: Getting a Book Into the System

In 1992, I published a book under my Groom Books imprint. Writing and printing a book were only part of the problem. Once boxes of finished books existed, they had to somehow reach readers. For a small publisher, that was difficult.

The American book business depended on a network of publishers, distributors, wholesalers, sales representatives, and bookstores. A small publisher could produce exactly the same physical object as Random House or Simon & Schuster, a printed and bound book, but did not possess their distribution infrastructure.

That made distribution itself a scarce resource. My solution was National Book Network, or NBN, in Lanham, Maryland. NBN had been founded by Jed Lyons in 1986 after his own publishing operation lost its distributor. Lyons concluded that other small publishers faced the same problem and created a distribution company to serve them. I was one of those publishers.

NBN distributed two Groom Books titles for me, published in 1992 and 1994. For a small publisher, a company such as NBN solved a fundamental problem. I could create a book without having to create a national book-distribution company of my own.

NBN supplied the infrastructure connecting my small publishing operation to the much larger book market. The basic architecture looked something like this:

Author → Publisher → Distributor → Bookstore/Retailer → Reader

Every arrow represented a real economic function. Books had to be printed, stored, catalogued, marketed, ordered, packed, shipped, invoiced, and sometimes returned. The physical object dictated the structure of the industry.

1995: Then Amazon Appeared

Almost immediately after my second Groom Books title appeared, something happened that would ultimately reorganize the entire system. Amazon began selling books on the Web in July 1995. At first, Amazon was still selling physical books. The book itself had not changed. What changed was discovery and retail distribution.

A conventional bookstore faced an unavoidable physical constraint: shelf space. Amazon did not. When it launched, it advertised more than one million titles and explained that a physical bookstore carrying that selection would be economically impossible. Within its first weeks, it had shipped books to customers in all 50 states and more than 45 countries.

That was revolutionary for a small publisher. Under the old model, producing a book did not mean that a potential reader could realistically find it. The book needed access to a distribution network and ultimately to scarce retail shelf space. The Internet began separating availability from physical shelf space.

The Attitude Media Stage

For my next two printed books, I used a different imprint: Attitude Media. But the more important change was not the name of the publisher. It was how the books reached the market. Instead of depending on the traditional NBN-style distribution system, I sold the books through Amazon.

The physical book still existed. Someone still had to manufacture it, store it, and eventually transport it to the reader. But a large portion of the old commercial architecture between a small publisher and a national audience was disappearing. The transition in my own publishing activity can therefore be represented simply:

Author → Small Publisher → NBN → Traditional Book Trade → Reader

became:

Author/Publisher → Amazon → Reader

That was an enormous structural change. I had not become a larger publisher. Technology had made it possible for a smaller organization to accomplish functions that previously required larger organizations and specialized intermediaries.

Then the Book Itself Disappeared

The next transition was more fundamental. I eventually stopped publishing printed books and moved to ebooks sold through Kindle.

Amazon introduced Kindle in November 2007. At launch, approximately 90,000 books were available, and a reader could purchase a book and receive the entire contents wirelessly in less than a minute. Amazon simultaneously introduced its Digital Text Platform, which eventually became Kindle Direct Publishing.

For an independent publisher, this removed another enormous layer of infrastructure. There was no longer necessarily a need to print hundreds or thousands of copies. There was no warehouse, no cartons of books, no physical inventory, and no need to ship an individual copy across the country. There was no bookstore shelf to secure and, critically, no possibility of running out of copies of a digital title. My distribution architecture had compressed again:

Author/Publisher → Kindle → Reader

The content remained. Much of the physical infrastructure surrounding it vanished.

Three Generations of the Same Business

My experience can therefore be divided into three technological generations:

This last change may be the most important. In the NBN era, my problem was getting a book distributed. In the Amazon print era, distribution became dramatically easier, but a physical object still had to reach the customer.

In the Kindle era, the marginal physical distribution problem approached zero. The scarce resource shifted elsewhere. Now the problem was increasingly getting someone to notice the book. That is a recurring pattern in technological change: solving one bottleneck exposes another.

The Remarkable Speed of the Transition

Consider how quickly this happened. My first NBN-distributed Groom Books title appeared in 1992. Amazon opened its online bookstore in 1995. Kindle appeared in 2007. By 2011, Amazon reported that it was selling more Kindle books than hardcover and paperback books combined on Amazon.com.

In less than twenty years, I personally went from needing a specialized national distributor to being able to make a book available electronically without manufacturing or physically distributing a book at all. And there is a fitting postscript.

NBN, the company that solved my distribution problem in the early 1990s, survived for decades and became a major independent distributor. But in 2024 it announced that it would close in 2025, with roughly 150 remaining publisher clients offered the opportunity to move to Simon & Schuster Distribution Services.

Publishers Weekly explicitly described the closure as another sign of the changing economics of book distribution. The company had not failed to perform its original function. The environment surrounding that function had changed.

Technology Does Not Just Make the Old Process Cheaper

This distinction matters. We often describe technological progress as though it simply makes an existing activity more efficient. But the publishing example demonstrates something more consequential.

Technology can eliminate entire structural layers. NBN was a rational solution to the economic environment of 1992. I could not economically reproduce the infrastructure it supplied. It aggregated many small publishers because combining their books made a national sales and distribution operation economically viable.

Amazon changed the architecture. Kindle changed it again. At each stage, fewer organizations were required to connect the creator with the ultimate consumer.

That does not mean intermediaries simply disappear. Amazon itself became an extraordinarily powerful intermediary. But its intermediary function was fundamentally different because software and networks allowed it to operate at a scale and marginal cost impossible in the old physical bookstore system.

The important question therefore is not merely, "What job did technology automate?" It is: What layer of the old structure became unnecessary once technology changed the constraints?

From Distribution Scarcity to Attention Scarcity

There is another lesson in this history. Technology did not eliminate scarcity. It moved scarcity. In 1992, publishing a book was difficult partly because distribution capacity was scarce. A small publisher needed access to companies such as NBN and ultimately to bookstores possessing limited shelf space.

Digital distribution largely destroyed that scarcity. Today, almost anyone can make a book globally available. Amazon says KDP allows independent authors to publish print and digital books and reach readers across numerous international marketplaces.

That sounds like the complete democratization of publishing. In one sense, it is. But when millions of people can publish, the ability to publish is no longer particularly scarce.

Attention becomes scarce instead. The 1992 question was: Can I get my book into the distribution system? The later question became: Can anyone find my book among everything else in the distribution system? That is a very different problem.

And Now AI Changes the Structure Again

Artificial intelligence may represent the next stage of exactly the same process. The first technological transformation reduced the cost of distributing physical information. The second reduced the cost of distributing digital information. AI is now dramatically reducing the cost of creating, transforming, summarizing, and analyzing information itself.

That means the scarce resource is likely to move again. When producing competent text becomes inexpensive, simply producing more text has less value. When virtually everything can be published, publication itself has little scarcity. And when machines can read enormous quantities of published material, even human attention may no longer be the only gateway through which information acquires value.

The emerging problems become questions of quality, provenance, trust, discovery, context, and demonstrated value. That is why my experience with NBN seems more relevant today than it did when I was simply shipping books.

In 1992, I was not thinking about technological disruption. I wanted to publish a book, and NBN was the practical way to get it distributed. When Amazon became the better structure, I used Amazon. When the physical book itself ceased to be necessary for what I wanted to accomplish, I used Kindle. Each time, the objective remained essentially the same:

Create information of value and get it to someone who values it.

Everything between those two points was infrastructure. Over the course of my publishing career, I watched technology progressively remove, compress, or reorganize that infrastructure.

That is one of the clearest ways to understand technological change. The important thing is not simply that computers make existing tasks faster. Sometimes they change the structure so completely that something which once required an entire industry becomes a button.