The familiar historical processes by which, over the centuries, texts have changed their form and content have now accelerated to a degree which makes the definition and location of textual authority barely possible in the old style. Professional librarians, under pressure from irresistible technological and social changes, are redefining their discipline in order to describe, house, and access sounds, static and moving images with or without words, and a flow of computer-stored information. By contrast, academic bibliography has only recently begun to find fresh stimulus in those developments and to tap the new experience and interests of students for whom books represent only one form of text.

Although bibliographers have always found interest not only in books themselves but in the social and technical circumstances of their production, it is again only recently that historical bibliography has gained acceptance as a field of study. The partial but significant shift this signals is one from questions of textual authority to those of dissemination and readership as matters of economic and political motive. Those relationships are difficult to pin down, but they are powerful in the ways they preclude certain forms of discourse and enable others; and because they determine the very conditions under which meanings are created, they lie at the heart of what has come to be known as histoire du livre, a form of inquiry relevant to the history of every text-dependent discipline.