Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from one brain to another without requiring tedious manual transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.
Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to produce these documents.
Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and they can only create that scarcity artificially.
Comments
That's quite an understatement.
Remarkably, it once was.
Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from one brain to another without requiring tedious manual transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.
Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to produce these documents.
Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and they can only create that scarcity artificially.