So I am going to relate this post to my history class so try and stay with me. During the European witch hunts many people were receiving their information from the church. The church and state were working together to end witchcraft, and the priest would gather the people in the church and read them the current publishings on witches. I feel like if more people had sextodecimos and were able to read the information on their own then the witch hunts would have been drastically different. The lack of access to the material at the time caused the people to listen to the leaders of the town so the information was incredibly biased. I think people would have either read the books on their own and decided that witchcraft didn’t exist and it would not have been such a big deal or it would have made the situation much worse.

If wide-scale marketing had been around back in the days when manuscripts were available, it would probably have been difficult to keep up with the demand that marketing would produce. The art of writing manuscripts would probably have been more wide-spread than it was, and paper making would have been more of a lucrative field to dabble in. Marketing would have helped the book business, especially when other people could advertise in your books, as is common in newspapers and magazines nowadays. People would be more tempted to invest in books if their name and brand was in the book, and an decent-sized audience would have been able to access it. Marketing would also probably increase the demand for public libraries, where these books could be accessed on a larger scale. If marketing was around earlier, book technology would have been moved along more quickly, because demand “demands” it.

http://manuscripts.cmrs.ucla.edu/index.php

What if one part of technology had progressed, such as the music industry, while book technology remained stagnant? It would be pretty bizarre to imagine a world where CDs and mp3s existed but manuscripts were still the main source of book-making. It is almost impossible to think that history would have progressed in such a way, but let’s just pretend for an instant that it did. Music and audio recordings would have been a much more popular way to record and pass along information, and the music industry nowadays would probably have been much more advanced than it is now. The book would have a fraction of its importance and worth, and reading would be somewhat of an elitist thing; people who had money and time to purchase and read books would be the only ones investing in them, whereas busy people on the go would simply listen to everything while additionally doing something else. The world would be a much different place.

As I started reading the article assigned by Professor Phillips by Walter Benjamin, I began to wonder about the monetary value of texts. Today, we greatly value original works and hand-made crafts, art, etc.  I’m reminded of some of the works Diane Shaw has shown us that she said were invaluable, that she could not even put a price on for a number of reasons: a small number of copies of the work exist, the work was created by hand, it has historical significance, etc.

So I wonder, had the processes of mechanical reproduction not developed, would literary texts with hand-drawn book art be more valuable?

I recently stumbled onto this website, which highlights 21 things that became obsolete this decade.  Among the list were PDA’s, video rental stores, public pay phones, VCRs, fax machines, CDs and paper.  I think it is crazy to think that many upcoming generations will never come in contact with such things.  I was astonished to find paper on the list, but in a way it makes sense considering my brother’s middle school has provided all of its students with iPads in an effort to move towards a more paperless environment. This surprised me because of the student’s ages.  My high school provided all of its students with laptops, but even then, we often used paper seeing as students still preferred to write their notes on paper. When I was inquiring about how popular it is becoming for schools to provide mediums like iPads for their students, I came across this website which lists 5 mistakes schools make with iPads.  While there clearly are pros and cons to using iPads in school, I am still left with mixed feelings.  Environmentally, cutting back on paper is extremely beneficial but for my own selfish reasons, nothing quite compares to writing and reading on and off of tangible pages.

I stumbled up this website that is dedicated to showcasing the most interesting out-of-copyright works online. It’s true that everything falls out of copyright at some point in time and here is a non-for-profit site that organizes them. There are a lot of interesting articles on the site.