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.
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.