Ruscelli died in 1566, after a painful illness, and Dolce followed him to the grave two years later. In their last years neither of them kept up the level of activity which they had achieved in the 1550s. They were growing older, of course, and they had made up their quarrels, so that they no longer had the spur of rivalry. However, their personal situations do not explain everything. The work of all editors was being affected by changes in the character of the Venetian book trade.

In the first place, the cultural climate of the Counter-Reformation was less favourable to secular vernacular and classical literature (including translations), the two areas in which editorial activity had been liveliest. Grendler's analysis of the imprimaturs granted to new titles in Venice shows that the printing of works in these categories declined in the 1560s as the book trade began to deal more in religious works. The same trend appears in the output of the Giolito press, run by Gabriele until his death in 1578 and then, less successfully, by his sons Giovanni and Giovanni Paolo.

The work available for Venetian editors was also reduced by a decline in the dominance of the city's printing houses within Italy. The imprimaturs and the holdings of the British Library suggest that the Serenissima's share of books printed in the peninsula fell from about 60 or 70 per cent in the third quarter of the century to about 40 or 50 per cent in the last quarter, and that there was a particularly sharp drop in output in the decade following the plague of 1575–7.