
How the invention of the book changed how people read - diodorus
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/how-invention-book-changed-how-people-read
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hrktb
Very interesting piece.

I also got caught in rabbit hole following the AAP report on ebooks sales
declining. It was an interesting ride, showing a glimpse on how much things
are changing and the industry is evolving.

The entry of the hole, a report on trade books sales, with numbers from
mainstream publishers: [https://newsroom.publishers.org/trade-book-publisher-
revenue...](https://newsroom.publishers.org/trade-book-publisher-revenues-
up-44-for-first-three-quarters-of-2018/)

Then digging further it seems these publisher also had a series of actions to
bring physical book prices down and promote them better to fight back the
ebook trend, which would explain the number.

Digging much further, independant publishing has become a thing, partly due to
the rise of ebook, and independant sales is said to have sharply rised. A take
on this trend: [https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/ebook-sales-doubled-
us-...](https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/ebook-sales-doubled-
us-2018-according-data-guys-nonsensical-bookstat-numbers/)

Or more into the indie side: [https://www.geekwire.com/2018/traditional-
publishers-ebook-s...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/traditional-publishers-
ebook-sales-drop-indie-authors-amazon-take-off/)

~~~
squeaky-clean
Anecdotally this is true for me. I used to buy kindle books frequently, now I
rarely do because costs have gone up and paperbacks are often cheaper.

Going through my email order history also confirms this to be true (in my
case) except for programming ebooks. Prices listed for my purchases are kindle
prices in USD. I can't lookup the paperback price on my day of purchase but it
would be higher otherwise I wouldn't buy the ebook.

May 2015 I bought The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (book 1) for 4.99.
Today kindle is 7.99 and paperback is 7.99 (also the ultimate edition
paperback with all 5 in the series is 13.31)

May 2015 I bought The Intelligent Investor Revised for 13.99. Today kindle is
16.99 and paperback is 12.39

Jun 2015 I bought Mistborn: the Final Empire for 4.99. Today kindle is 8.99
and paperback is 8.92.

Jun 2015 I bought Soul of a New Machine for 9.99. Today kindle is 9.99 and
paperback is 9.79

Aug 2015 I bought Snow Crash for $7.68. Today kindle is 13.99 and paperback is
13.15

And I can keep going but I think you all get the point.

~~~
animal531
Strange, on Amazon from the 3rd world kindle books are a lot cheaper for me.

The ease of finding and buying them has upped my reading significantly.

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jamesrcole
Thinking out loud, the utility of the book seems to come from it being
composed of standardized, _discrete_ units (pages). It's easier to progress
through it by turning pages, and it has addressability (ability to mark pages,
such as to indicate the current place you're at).

And the downsides of the bookroll -- awkwardness to progress through it,
having to 'rewind' them after finishing them, and lack of addressability --
comes from them being _continuous_.

It's interesting to note that modern reading on the web is usually continuous
(scrolling). It doesn't have the awkwardness of moving through the text that
bookrolls did, as the computer handles that. But it does have the problem of
lack of addressability.

~~~
franky47
One major difference between reading on the web though is the mutability of
the support. Content can change without notice, or simply disappear (though
this has parallels with physical books).

I find the point of durability interesting, on how codices protected the paper
better than scrolls, and had the side-effect of surviving longer and in
harsher conditions. I believe the same cannot be said for digital supports:
what are the chances that an EPUB file be readable (assuming file integrity
and language liveliness) in the next couple of centuries ? Even if "digital
monks" copy the contents of those books from one format to the next to ensure
readability, at one point practicality of a paper printed version for long-
term storage will prevail.

~~~
hrktb
This is an interesting argument as we are in completely unknown territory.

As is it now we have some of the oldest scripts still readable because of pure
luck (they were trapped in specific materials that preserved them, stayed in
unopened cave etc.), extremely high effort (actively kept in pristine
condition, backed up, repaired as needed) or wide appeal (e.g. religious
books, reference books)

Basically we don't have much of the random papers circulating in markets and
left lying around when their appeal was pretty small.

I think the same process will still happen with digital data, there will be a
very low chance to find back the integrality of random users facebook posts,
or the verge's amazon echo reviews in 4 centuries. But the work of the
'digital monks' will still be a lot easier, and I'd expect the bar to preserve
any specific content to be a lot lower than what we had in the past.

Say, people's cooking recipes might survive a few centuries more, and possibly
at a massive scale if a few dozens of people take the time to make that
happen, where in the past this would just be unrealistic.

~~~
franky47
> I'd expect the bar to preserve any specific content to be a lot lower than
> what we had in the past.

At the moment, I agree.

However, as older civilizations rose and fell, their knowledge lived on in
physical support, directly accessible by anyone who was taught how to read the
language, therefore the assumption was that "as long as the language lives on,
books are a good archiving support".

When our modern digital civilization falls [1], I'm not sure most of it would
be transmittable through long-term electronic archiving supports that may be
easily readable (as easily as a written book at least) by future
civilizations, because not only the language has to live on, but the
technology needed to access the content also has to function.

I also agree that some contents will always be more relevant to "backup". As
for everything that happened on Facebook (same can be said for most social
platforms), it is likely to entirely disappear with the company. One could
even see it as a parallel civilization, that has no means of self-preservation
other than that of their ruling entity's business interest.

[1] Jonathan Blow - Preventing the collapse of civilization -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-
SOdj4Kkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk)

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jamesrcole
The article discusses the pros and cons of bookrolls and codexes (books),
which is interesting, but it doesn't really discuss how books changed how
people read.

~~~
m0nty
Joshua Foer goes into this in 'Moonwalking with Einstein', approaching from
the view of a would-be mnemonist and how scrolls were far less efficient than
books. OA touches on headings, indexes and tables of content, but Foer goes
into more detail and discusses how these innovations made books a far more
powerful way to store, index and retrieve knowledge. It's not exactly a deep
dive but it might provide some roads into the subject.

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geraldbauer
FYI: I've put together a free book format called Manuscripts. See
[http://manuscripts.github.io](http://manuscripts.github.io) and find an
example bookshelf @
[http://yukimotopress.github.io](http://yukimotopress.github.io) Happy book
writing. Happy book reading.

~~~
japanoise
This looks rather like an ebook written with pandoc[1]; if you don't mind,
what prompted you to write your own rather than using an existing format?

[1]: [https://pandoc.org/epub.html](https://pandoc.org/epub.html)

~~~
geraldbauer
The new format is (way) easier / simpler and yes, you can use pandoc for
markdown processing. If you create an online book than you can just use HTML &
CSS e.g. a "standard" website or a webpage is a book. You should ask why the
book industry created a new format, that is, EPUB :-).

PS: That's also the direction the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) tries to go
(but failed). See the upcoming
[https://www.w3.org/TR/wpub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/wpub/) recommendation /
standard / spec trying to replace EPUB. Compare the book manifest of
manuscripts with the book manifest of wpub to see what format keeps it simple.

PPS: And to keep apple and oranges apart - FYI: pandoc is NOT a book format
(it's a text processor), thus, you should compare Manuscripts to EPUB or the
new WPUB.

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ch33zer
I think the author could have drawn more attention to how reading has changed
recently, outside of just ebooks. Blogs, word processors, and articles are
also massively changing how we consume information. Certainly still an
interesting article, even if the title is a bit innacurate.

