
Publishers Gave Away 123M Books During World War II - jrslv
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/publishers-gave-away-122951031-books-during-world-war-ii/379893/?single_page=true
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veddox
Interesting side note: German publishers hit on a similar strategy in the
early post-war years. Nobody could afford to buy hardcovers anymore, so they
printed their books on newspaper-paper instead, to be sold cheaply at the
roadside - and thrived.

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a3n
> so they printed their books on newspaper-paper

That's called newsprint.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsprint](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsprint)

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m52go
Very interesting. I wonder if something similar could happen today...digital
or our paper, books have so much to compete with for peoples' attention.

I think we as a society could really use it.

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veddox
> I think we as a society could really use it.

Definitely. I think books are by far the most effective way of giving people a
real education. There's nothing like a good collection of books for teaching
you knowledge, broadening your worldview and making you a thinking citizen.

Books are more available now than they ever were before - just think Project
Gutenberg. Unfortunately, we lack the general culture of serious reading that
would be needed to fully make use of that potential.

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petra
It's not just culture, even many people who love to read, find it difficult to
read among all the distractions and the impact of the net.

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wodenokoto
It is funny how "giving away a book" has changed meaning since then.

Today, "giving away 1 book" is easily understood as potentially indefinite
copies of a single work, but the headline here refers to 123 million, physical
copies of a much smaller amount of works.

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lkbm
Since it came with the WWII context and the 123M number, it didn't even occur
to me that today we'd read it differently, but you're right--if it were about
today, and about <500 books, I'd think it was giving copyright. (At higher
numbers, I'd assume physical copies unless it explicitly said copyright.)

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frik
Many books were "given away" (forced) and burnt in fires at
Reichskristallnacht Nov 1938:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht)

Many thousands years old historic books, papyrus papers were destroyed amd
vanished forever.

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jacquesm
The future dystopian version of that: you wake up one morning to find out that
all your e-books have self destructed based on a remote command embedded in
your reader that would otherwise allow a retraction by the publisher.

[http://www.wired.com/2012/10/amazons-remote-wipe-of-
customer...](http://www.wired.com/2012/10/amazons-remote-wipe-of-customers-
kindle-highlights-perils-of-drm/)

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EliRivers
That's the present dystopia. The future dystopia is that off-message books get
censored and rewritten on your device without you ever knowing.. or is that
also the present dystopia? :)

