Monday, July 29, 2013

Death is often a good career move for an author


"Furthermore, I believe that the big transition in social life came not with the gramophone, but when someone had the great but unjust idea to invent the alphabet , thus allowing us to store information and reproduce it . It accelerated further when another inventor had the even more dangerous and iniquitous notion of starting a printing press, thus promoting texts across boundaries and triggering what ultimately grew into a winner-take-all ecology. Now, what was so unjust about the spread of books? The alphabet allowed stories and ideas to be replicated with high fidelity and without limit , without any additional expenditure of energy on the author’s part for the subsequent performances. He didn’t even have to be alive for them—death is often a good career move for an author. This implies that those who, for some reason, start getting some attention can quickly reach more minds than others and displace the competitors from the bookshelves. In the days of bards and troubadours, everyone had an audience. A storyteller, like a baker or a coppersmith, had a market , and the assurance that none from far away could dislodge him from his territory. Today, a few take almost everything; the rest, next to nothing."

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