Overview

can count how many seeds are in the apple, but not how many apples are in the seed.

Ken Kesey

Over the past 2 decades printing, paper, and transportation costs rose while their electronic counterparts: computing, electronic storage, and communication costs, halved roughly every 4 years. Both trends are expected to continue for at least 2 more decades.

The last time something this radical happened was in the 15th century when the printing press used the newly available cheap paper to take over the manuscript market, throw scribes out of work, and explosively increase the number of available books.

Print led to pagination, indices, and bibliographies since they were now possible and they made searching easier. And that forced people to learn the alphabet so that they could use the new indices. Print increased literacy, democratized knowledge, increased accuracy, made fiction possible, made propaganda possible, created public libraries, and created the idea of authorship.

Print also decreased the importance of memories--and their main possessors, the elders; loosened the hold of the Church and led to the Reformation; added fuel to the Humanist movement and led to the Renaissance by putting classical authors back in print; increased education, science, and technology transfer; and created publishers.

Electronic books may bring changes of similar magnitude.