It's the custom (or stubborn habit) around newspapers to reflect on the 11 months gone by when December arrives. "Best of" lists occupy the attention of many writers, including this one ( see mine here ), so their creation does force us to be reflective in a business where reaction usually trumps reflection.

But changes don't come gift-wrapped in tidy 12-month packages. In the world of American book publishing, 2011 flowed gradually from 2010 without sudden shocks or change, the nature of the passing year shaped by the inevitable progress of movements in the business that started years before.

One image captured the direction of that movement concisely -- Daniel Clowes' cover for the Dec. 5 New Yorker titled "Black Friday." The cartoon shows a store with shelves filled with T-shirts, caps, bags and figurines of famous authors and a table displaying e-readers. Only a bottom shelf carries a row of print books.

It's the bookstore of tomorrow, if you can find an actual bookstore (cognoscenti call them "bricks and mortar") these days. The traditional business model, which is at least 200 years old, centers around new hardcover books prominently displayed in a bricks-and-mortar outlet where shoppers browse looking for familiar names or interesting covers.

That model is slowly slipping away, to be replaced by versions of the one on the New Yorker cover. Eventually, the new plan envisions a small space where only the covers of available books will be displayed along with that small digital square.

You'll scan the square with your phone, buy the book online and then you'll choose if you want an ebook or tell the store to print on paper no less, a real book on its copier/binder machine.

Cartoonist Clowes is no great seer. It seems clear he was inspired by an article in another magazine, "The Book on Publishing" by Keith Gessen in the October Vanity Fair.

Mr. Gessen, a young novelist and journalist, tells us he is a close friend of Chad Harbach, the "wonder boy" of 2011 who sold his novel, "The Art of Fielding," for $665,000 advance to Little, Brown. For a first-time (or anytime) author it's like getting one of those multimillion-dollar bonuses paid to executives of bailed-out banks.

Vanity Fair editors gave him wide latitude to praise his pal and his book uncritically while letting readers see a glimpse of the hit-and-miss process of getting a book first to an agent and then to a publisher.

He also did legwork on the business's slow but certain acceptance of the ebook, including comments from Mike Shatzkin, a digital marketing guru who said:

"If we get to the day when the store is still called Barnes & Noble and it has one shelf of books and is otherwise full of stationery, plush toys and reading gadgets, is it still a bookstore?"

(I read Mr. Gessen's story on a Kindle, expanded as an ebook because it was easy and cheap to download, as will be most new books in the future.)

If cartoonist Clowes didn't read that passage, then he channeled it somehow.

The article then was both about the traditional way that American publishers operate and the future of how they will sell their products. It seemed to reassure us that the nature of books will not change because somebody believed in "The Art of Fielding" enough to pay its author a huge advance based on the literary merits of the novel.

But, before you get all warm and fuzzy about publishers, let me remind you that somebody named Jon-Jon Goulian received $750,000 from Random House recently for his memoir of cross-dressing, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt." That payoff was why Mr. Harbach shopped his manuscript around at an auction to get a similar amount, said Mr. Gessen.

For our purposes, I'll leave the future of business models in publishing to financial experts and continue to believe that the essential nature of the book will go on unchanged. Nothing that occurred in the past 12 months or 24 indicated any sea change in that situation.

The nature of the year's books, for example, was undistinguishable from 2010's including "The Art of Fielding" which unfortunately for its author at least, was called "Franzen-like."

Jonathan Franzen's novel, "Freedom," was the most-discussed title of last year and in many ways, was similar to the younger Mr. Harbach's work with its Midwestern setting, emotional struggles and isolated women characters.

Why "Freedom" is a better novel than "The Art of Fielding" is its maturity and wisdom coming from an author who has developed both the hard way -- by living.

I wasn't convinced that Mr. Harbach, whose life experience was acquired in graduate writing classes and editing a literary journal, was ready to create full-blown characters I could live with. He described their characters rather than feeling them.

My sense of Mr. Harbach's young adulthood from the Vanity Fair article was a life lived largely among other writers like himself, part of the Brooklyn-based, creative-writing grads colony who know what everybody else is writing.

I was reminded of a simple observation by the late John Updike from an essay he wrote on Van Gogh:

"There is some artistic advantage in feeling like a stranger on earth."

There's also the fact that Mr. Harbach is a conventional writer with no interest in moving beyond the traditional novel's chronological structure or straightforward characters.

Others who were out of the mold this year such as Tea Obreht ("The Tiger's Wife") and Haruki Murakami ("1Q84") were exceptions among a spate of straightforward fiction.

Nonfiction was largely unadventuresome as well with such familiar names as Erik Larson, Michael Lewis, Walter Isaacson, Joan Didion and David McCullough publishing books.

Some news of note was reported this year.

• Writers Ann Patchett and Garrison Keillor added to the ranks of independent bookstores.

Ms. Patchett, author of "State of Wonder," opened Parnassus Books in Nashville last month, while the Minneapolis public radio star is moving his Common Good Books to a bigger location in St. Paul, Minn. (The downside is that Mr. Keillor is rethinking his decision to retire from radio in 2013.)

• The era of the book blog, a trend that mushroomed in the previous decade, seems to be slowing. Recently, the publicity department at Morrow Books told the blogging rabble that it might cut off the flow of requested free books if the bloggers failed to cite those books online.

Meanwhile, the print medium dinosaurs are buried weekly in a barrage of titles, proving perhaps that we still count for something.

• Kudos to the usually serious David Guterson, who is the winner of this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award from Britain's Literary Review. The praised passages can be found in "Ed King," Mr. Guterson's latest novel in which his title character commits incest.

• Finally, a word about me and the events of 2011. I officially retired this year after 40 years working for newspapers of various stripes, 23 of them as book editor of the Post-Gazette.

There'll be no farewell column full of soggy memories of the "good old days" because I will still be reviewing books and plays.

Happy New Year.

First Published: December 25, 2011, 10:00 a.m.