First: the printing press. If you were an author in 1400, the largest value-add you brought was your handwriting. The labor and skill that went into copying made up the majority of the value of each book. Authors confronted with a future where their most valued skill is automated at thousands of times their speed and accuracy were probably terrified. Each book would be worth a tiny fraction of what they were worth before, surely not enough to support a career.
That seems unlikely to me. The occupations of professional scribe and author did not much overlap. Can you name 3 examples of authors from 1400-1500 whose name anyone would know without checking Wikipedia, who primarily made a living as scribes and so might have been ‘terrified’ to learn of Gutenberg’s press, rather than elated? This sounds like a strawman. (WP, for example, provides a list of notable scribes; the only name I recognize is fictional.) How does this scenario where authors are valued primarily for their ‘handwriting’ work economically, in terms of specialization and comparative advantage? Geoffrey Chaucer sits down to write the next installment of Canterbury Tales and on completion, instead of handing over it to one of the legions of professional scribes to copy, he… starts copying out by hand 100 copies himself? Surely whatever compensation Chaucer (or other authors) received which motivated him to write, it was not being paid a few pounds for a stack of 100 copies he made and then sells in the streets.
Hmm fair enough, I didn’t consider that there would already be a lot of specialization between authors and copyists pre-press. Still, I think I can rewrite the paragraph to remove this error and preserve the parts relevant to the overall post:
>First: the printing press. In 1400, the labor and skill that went into copying a book made up the majority of its value. Authors confronted with a future where the most valuable part of each of their books is automated for a tiny fraction of the cost might understandably be terrified. Each book would be worth a tiny fraction of what they were worth before, surely not enough to support a career.
That still makes no sense. Why would authors be terrified by scribes being disemployed, when authors received no percentage or payment whatsoever from scribes per copy? At the worst, they would be indifferent. It would matter as much to them as, say, someone discovering a replacement for parchment or vellum which threatened the livelihoods of sheepherders (like Chinese ‘paper’ made from plants rather than animals).
A couple of reasons why authors might be worried about the press:
It’s a massive change to the technology of what they produce. This comes with lots of uncertainty and fear.
It commodifies books and massively decreases the unit price. Depending on how much you think quantity demanded will change, it could easily decrease your income. E.g, if the press came around and no one read any more books, it would be scary for authors and many would be out of work since now a single author can produce 100x more books.
That seems unlikely to me. The occupations of professional scribe and author did not much overlap. Can you name 3 examples of authors from 1400-1500 whose name anyone would know without checking Wikipedia, who primarily made a living as scribes and so might have been ‘terrified’ to learn of Gutenberg’s press, rather than elated? This sounds like a strawman. (WP, for example, provides a list of notable scribes; the only name I recognize is fictional.) How does this scenario where authors are valued primarily for their ‘handwriting’ work economically, in terms of specialization and comparative advantage? Geoffrey Chaucer sits down to write the next installment of Canterbury Tales and on completion, instead of handing over it to one of the legions of professional scribes to copy, he… starts copying out by hand 100 copies himself? Surely whatever compensation Chaucer (or other authors) received which motivated him to write, it was not being paid a few pounds for a stack of 100 copies he made and then sells in the streets.
On a side note, you still haven’t responded to the comments on your most recent post about misrepresenting critics to provide a strawman.
Hmm fair enough, I didn’t consider that there would already be a lot of specialization between authors and copyists pre-press. Still, I think I can rewrite the paragraph to remove this error and preserve the parts relevant to the overall post:
>First: the printing press. In 1400, the labor and skill that went into copying a book made up the majority of its value. Authors confronted with a future where the most valuable part of each of their books is automated for a tiny fraction of the cost might understandably be terrified. Each book would be worth a tiny fraction of what they were worth before, surely not enough to support a career.
That still makes no sense. Why would authors be terrified by scribes being disemployed, when authors received no percentage or payment whatsoever from scribes per copy? At the worst, they would be indifferent. It would matter as much to them as, say, someone discovering a replacement for parchment or vellum which threatened the livelihoods of sheepherders (like Chinese ‘paper’ made from plants rather than animals).
A couple of reasons why authors might be worried about the press:
It’s a massive change to the technology of what they produce. This comes with lots of uncertainty and fear.
It commodifies books and massively decreases the unit price. Depending on how much you think quantity demanded will change, it could easily decrease your income. E.g, if the press came around and no one read any more books, it would be scary for authors and many would be out of work since now a single author can produce 100x more books.