The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) represents the best exemplar of a voluntary organization engaged in the distribution of religious literature for most of the eighteenth century. The changing nature of the SPCK was a feature of broader developments in voluntary religious activity within the British Isles. The most important of these was the growth of evangelical piety and its stress on lay involvement in philanthropy and the improvement of the lives of the poor. A narrow group of evangelicals was similarly prominent in the Church Missionary Society (CMS). By concentrating on overseas missions, especially in areas of recent colonial expansion, the CMS avoided the issue of competition with older societies such as the SPCK. Many of the sponsors of the CMS, however, were soon involved in another venture, the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its rapid success, moreover, helped to change the organization and structure of other voluntary societies during the early nineteenth century.

Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination concerns English Bibles, and there is no better case study of the interaction of public and private interest, commerce and edification, than the English Bible. Many of the Catholic books of the devotional writers included prefaces addressed to the impartial Christian reader, and not just to the Catholics. The use of a commonplace book was typical of university-trained readers, but Nicholas Byfield's Directions for the private reading of the Scriptures, first published in 1617 or 1618, was an attempt to make the practice more widespread among lay Bible readers.