Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business.
This is very different from the digital age.
I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
<https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/article/Aaron-Swartz-Ope...>
Archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20220926160659/https://www.sfchr...> <https://archive.ph/B88pV>
Copyright has nothing to do with it. Printing press did that.
The truth is probably the opposite of what you are claiming.
Increased literacy resulted in incentives to create copyright legislation.
I think there's a somewhat irrational fear from publishers that anyone with a personal computer can create 1 million copies of a book almost instantly (ok, maybe a few hours, depending on disk speed), and distribute them almost as quickly.
I imagine there were similar fears of the printing press from book scribes back in the 16th century.
The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
It's not. They want you to pay them for the book instead of just getting it for free.
Luckily, for now, piracy doesn't seem to be making that huge a dent in author income as far as I know. Many people find it easier to buy their book with one click on Amazon or one of the other storefronts, or read through a bunch of books with a single Kindle Unlimited subscription.
I'm not sure how long that will last. Some authors are updating their business model to include subscription services like Patreon, where they sell more direct interaction, character naming rights, early access, and additionally gated materials to dedicated readers. This is probably good to secure their income stream in the long term.
One copy in memory can serve millions on your website.
But they have to download it, and you might not have the bandwidth to service millions of downloads in less than a few hours ….
My mind was dead-set on the printing press analogy for some reason.
There was even a period (ancient greece to middle-ages) where the very notion of "author" did not make much sense as books would get copied and augmented many times over by new copyists/contributors.
Kind of a sad that we lost this practice along the way, where a book was a living, evolving thing.
A chief difference is that with a wiki there's a canonical current version which everyone is working from. With written manuscripts there's ... just a bunch of different (usually handwritten) variations and modifications of a manuscript.
(Modifications wouldn't have been made to a single print copy, usually, though there are such practices as marginalia.)
What you'd see especially are commentaries on works. E.g., Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle, or the many commentaries which accompany Sun Tzu's text (itself likely a compilation) in Art of War.
That said, good observation. I've been suggesting for some years that the wiki is itself a distinct form of literature, though itself with some precursors, such as loose-leaf bindings which enabled the notion of a loose-leaf service in which a book could be continuously updated over time, dating to the late 19th century:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_leaf>
See for example Nelson's Encyclopedia:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson%27s_Encyclopaedia>
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Homiletic_Review/YN...>
These were advertised (and I'm pretty certain patented) in the late 19th / early 20th centuries.
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Magazine_of_Busines...>
But as an evolution of recordkeeping forms: clay/stone tablets, papyrus scrolls, codices, moveable type (15th c), card catalogues (18th/19th c), punch cards (19th c), loose leaf (19th/20th c), databases (1950s), revision control (1970s) (Wiki entry: <https://expertiza.csc.ncsu.edu/index.php/History_of_version-...>), online books (Project Gutenberg), hypertext, and wikis, might be one phylogeny.
Yes, back in the ages when you needed a scribe or a huge printing press. It's not like knowledge and books were magically free.
Now in the digital age we can create as many copies, without consuming physical material, as we want and distribute it globally.
The realities are extremely different. Perhaps copyright could be amended, but I can't envision its complete removal being net beneficial.
Don't have a citation off the top of my head though.
