The conventional scholarship on the history of the Ottoman printing establishment is filled with assumptions and generalizations. It also contends itself with either the 18th century beginnings under Ibrahim Müteferrika or focuses on the Hamidian period by taking a leap of almost a century and a half. A new focus on the Ottoman archival material, however, has made it possible to weave together a coherent story of the formation of the Ottoman printing enterprise during the Tanzimat period when the Ottoman state itself was transforming. Arguing that the consolidation of the Ottoman printing press and related policies took a new turn with the establishment of the Directorate of Takvimhane-i Amire in 1831, this paper is going to construct a new periodization unique to the printing policies of the empire in three stages based on a supply-demand model. The general outline suggests that from 1831 to 1840, the state almost singularly shaped the demand for printing through its related policies and this demand was met by the main supplier, the Imperial Press. From 1840 to 1857, however, private customers, as authorized by the imperial decree of 1840, appeared as agents on the demand side of the enterprise by commissioning books at the Imperial Press. The supplier, once again, was the Imperial Press. This period also witnessed an increasing number of actors and agents penetrating into the printing world for their own different reasons, and placing the Ottoman state in a conflictual relationship with different parties. In the process, a series of legislations were enacted as a means of positioning the legal interests of state against these factions. Competing interests also suggested that the Ottoman printed book market between 1840-1857 had entered a phase of commercialization. After 1857, the demand for printing came from both state and the private customers as before, but the suppliers of printed books expanded to include the private printers as much as the Imperial Press. Overall, I argue that the changing economic and political dynamics of each specified time interval of the nineteenth century also dictated a change in the perspective to print; new concepts, agents and institutions, each ending up being regulated by standardizing decrees and regulations, defined a new and convoluted phase in the development of printing in the Ottoman Empire.