Book people love books. We love to hold them, turn their pages, read and collect them, learn from them, thrill to their artistry and marvel at their ability to transport us to distant times and places and insert us into the lives of people very different from ourselves. Then, when we’ve reached “The End,” we love to ponder books’ meanings and discuss them with anyone up for the conversation.

The Untold Story of Books is by Michael Castleman is subtitled A Writer’s History of Publishing and it is that, mostly. Although I’d add an asterisk to that subtitle because really it’s a history of Western publishing, and mostly American. But that quibble aside, it is an informative foray into how books came to be a commodity much like any product.

Castleman divides the history of publishing into three ages, and we are (according to him) currently in the third age, which is the era of digital publishing. There is a lot of really interesting information in here, especially for those in the industry, in whatever capacity, or just die-hard book nerds like myself. Castleman gives what to me seems a pretty objective overview of the various players in the business, whether that’s publishers, agents, booksellers, or the authors themselves.

Just a couple of the many passages I highlighted:

During the entire twentieth century, the second book business published approximately 2.5 million titles. Today, publishers and self-publishers produce that many new releases every year or two.

There’s no shortage of good to great books out there. My to-be-read stack is a tower. But with so much attention focused on so few titles, many excellent books get ignored, robbing readers of the opportunity to discover them and leaving their authors frustrated or worse.

Not everyone spends their leisure time reading books, but a huge swath of the population loves to read and won’t stop, no matter what new widgets software engineers dream up.

By the end of the book, he touches on the emergence of AI, but doesn’t really go much into it, probably because that’s a brave new world we are just beginning to see take form. But that may very well be the fourth age.