The Gutenberg system

In 1439, Johannes Gutenberg invented the process of movable type, thus making the mass production of books
possible, leading to a huge increase in the availability of knowledge. The system of printing books is now being
challenged by the internet, which makes the availability of texts much cheaper, easier and faster.

Some publishers have been looking back at the era of print in which they had a near-monopoly on
literature. True, any writer could pay a printer to produce copies, but the problem was getting the
book into the hands of readers. This is what publishers did, connecting printers with customers.
Along the way, they shouldered some of the risk and pocketed much of the profit. But now, thanks
to computers and the internet, inexpensive apps allow authors without coding experience to
produce handsome ebooks and market them directly via Amazon and similar sites. Online
publishers and bookstores, of course, also take a hefty cut, often over 30 percent, but this is
small compared to the percentages siphoned off by the traditional mode of publication. ...
from The Written World: How Literature Shaped History Martin Puchner (2017)

The internet system

But what are the consequences of the internet system of publishing?

The most influential new vehicle for organizing knowledge is the online encyclopedia. I remember
the early days of Wikipedia, when its crowdsourced approach was ridiculed by academics. The
ridicule has stopped because those same academics now routinely use Wikipedia as their first
source of information, yours truly included. I like to think that Benjamin Franklin and the French
encyclopedists would have embraced the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Wikipedia. 5

But even though authors seem to be the winners of our writing revolution, they are at least as
worried as publishers. While Gutenberg had taken writing tools from authors and given them to
publishers, the printing press had also become a boon to authors, giving those who managed to
become professional writers access to a large readership at a low cost. But now, suddenly,
everyone can become a writer and find readers through social media. Other authors worry that 10
in future they will become mere content providers, whose products will be regarded not as
original contributions of independent minds but as a form of customer service, designed to meet
a particular demand. At the high end, some of those service providers might well become
celebrities, working with a whole workshop of assistants, but they, too, would not be authors in
the traditional sense of individuals originating new stories. It is true that computers can facilitate 15
the creation of original content, but they lend themselves much more easily to remixing what
already exists. To what extent is the age of Cervantes, which is to say the age of modern print
authorship, waning, giving way to the curator, the celebrity, and the customer service provider
hoping to stay afloat in a sea of user-generated content?

from The Written World: How Literature Shaped History Martin Puchner (2017)

© David Ripley, Inthinking

http://www.thinkib.net/englishb