The first print-house appeared in the Ottoman Empire in 1720s in Istanbul, a century after Ottoman historian Peçevi (1572-1650) informed Ottoman Turkish readers about a new technique of reproducing texts.First works of literature, on the other hand, would be printed in 1830s at the Bulak press, Alexandria. Istanbul print-houses would catch up with Bulaq press by 1850s, upstarting a new form of literature. This new literature enabled by printing would shift the ground beneath the feet of Ottoman littérateurs and produce a new process of literary production which would eventually create a new kind of writer: the author. The gradual appearance of print technologies in a vibrant manuscript culture shifted the forms of production, distribution and readership of poetry and prose, but more importantly these technologies created new challenges and opportunities for the writers of literary texts. With a focus on the demise of littérateurs and the birth of the author, this paper first briefly presents the initial findings from a project on earliest printed literary texts in Bulak and Istanbul in order to discuss the complex relationship between print and literature in the first half of the 19th century, then focuses on two periods of print-boom in the Ottoman Istanbul in the second half of the century. I argue that the development of printing didn't bring literature to the foreground initially, rather, printing gradually redefined the concept of literature in Turkish by distancing the writer from the act of publishing, and endowing him with a new form of agency in a counter-intuitive manner. This agency was determined by the material conditions of book production in the print era. The paper stresses the role of the print-houses, new editing processes, and the connections between the print-house and the producers of literature in the emergence of this new authorial agency.