The Sinhalese felt their Buddhist beliefs were under threat by the Hinduism of Tamils, even though they outnumbered the Tamils. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. Today, with new technological advances offered by the Internet, the possibility of digitizing written documents seems to offer books a new immortality.
But not so fast, Knuth says. This is a problem archivists at the Smithsonian Institution regularly tackle, including electronic records archivist Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig.
Schmitz Fuhrig says one of the biggest challenges now is storage space. Sometimes doing so is counter to the beliefs of whoever happens to be in power. The most decisive development for the increased book production was the invention of the printing press. The rise of the actual number of books is even greater as Dittmar shows; the number of books printed per edition rose as depicted in this figure.
Shown is the number of new book-titles per million inhabitants. The increased demand of books was driven by a huge decrease in the price of books. The smaller price was possible by the increased efficiency in the production of books since the invention of the printing press around Clark measures the subsequent productivity increase as the ratio between the wage of building craftsmen and the price of a book and finds a fold increase in productivity in the first years after the invention, as shown in this graph.
Productivity is measured as the ratio between the wage of building craftsmen and the price of a book of standard characteristics. Clark notes that copyists before the time of the printing press were able to copy 3, words of plain text per day. This implies that the production of one copy of the Bible meant days of work. For three florins the Ripoli Press produced 1, copies whereas the scribe would produce one copy for one florin.
This implies that the cost per book decreased times with the introduction of the printing press. A long run perspective of the real price of books in the Netherlands between and is depicted in this figure. This created a "page", which, when glued together, became a scroll. This technique was used for hundreds of years and the Greeks and Romans soon adopted it. They would carefully wrap the scroll around a large piece of wood so it could be stored or transported and then unwound in a very grand gesture, to be read out loud.
This method was used until the 8th century AD. Slightly before this time, in another part of the world, parchment such as calf skin , or deer skin , began to be used as it was less likely to tear, and there was a shortage of papyrus. The parchment would be treated in alkaline then written over in ink.
The Greeks and Romans also invented wax tablets , which were blocks of wood layered with wax so you could scratch a message into them, then erase them and re-use them again and again sort of like an etch-a-sketch! The first actual book written on paper is said to have been made in China. It was created using mulberries, hemp, bark and even fish to form a big pulp, that could be pressed and dried to form paper. Each sheet of paper was roughly the size of a newspaper and called a "leaf".
As soon as the leaf was printed upon with ink by using wooden printing blocks , it was known as a "folio", which is another word for leaf. Gradually, individual books, which were highly precious, were formed.
Some of these books held highly important information or religious texts and others told glorious, wicked or wonderful stories. The first book ever written that we know of is The Epic of Gilgamesh : a mythical retelling of an important political figure from history. In the 14th century, the Jikji was printed in Korea in movable metal type : a collection of Buddhist Zen teachings. A century later, in , a German man called Johannes Gutenburg built a printing press to print the Gutenburg Bible, which led to printers springing up all across Europe.
A man named Aldus Manutious founded a printing press in Venice with the desire to create pocket-sized books that retold the Greek Classics. Suddenly, anyone could write down their prescriptions for the best way to live. During the and s, Conduct books told men how to behave in polite society, and were popular in Italy, France, and England. In the s people voraciously consumed advice on weight-loss, parenting, marriage, time management, home management, etiquette, success, self-control, mind power, grief, self-medicine; no psychological subject was considered too challenging for the lay person to apprehend.
In , GK Chesterton wrote a screed against the popularity of books telling people how to succeed. Many of the most ancient self help texts are still in print. Self-help books created from one culture can be just as popular in another: Wayne Dyer is popular in the Netherlands.
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