The main impact on the Spanish publishing industry of the shift from dictatorship to democracy has been the creation of a literary scene led by market forces. The Franco regime, in its attempt to control cultural production through censorship, forced the publishing industry, like the other media, into an at least obliquely political role. The only publishers which could be said to cater to the market were those which, like Planeta, co-existed happily with the regime. However, the market was largely construed by them as a passive entity that would consume what it was given. Opposition publishers, notably Carlos Barral, tended to act as good-intentioned cultural mandarins decreeing what the public ought to want. Consequently they failed to reach the masses, except with the 1960s Latin American fictional “boom,” whose exhaustion by the early 1970s drove publishers to invent “the new Spanish novel” by commissioning a body of highly intellectual, largely unreadable novels by young writers.