scroll to codex
“We should thus in any event expect some rise in the percentage of the total made up of Christian texts in the late third and even more in the fourth century, and we do have such a rise. It is striking, however, that even in the fourth century classical literature and other types of non-Christian text make up something like three-fifths of the population of codices, and before that point non-Christian texts make up an even higher percentage of codices. This is part of the reason that it has become impossible to maintain that the codex was a specifically Christian book-form or that the move from scroll to codex in the Roman world was primarily driven by Christianity.”
In his new book Roger Bagnall goes on to disassociate the shift from papyrus to parchment with sectarian preference. Again he considers that transformation within a larger context of changes in reading. The scroll was a medium for recitation as its line length indicates, while the codex implemented textual communication and scribal copying.
So a larger Empirium, both of the Roman world and new reading behaviors is at work. And the paprologists can also look at the very mountain of their resources which are the middens of tons of papyrus letters, folded and tied, that suggest a further link of network exchange as a source of the advent of the codex.
(The illustration is an Ethiopian Koran from a recent link from Artes del Libro.)
november sales
American Association of Publishers reports that November book sales increased 10.9% to $808 million. Of that $18 million is accounted e-book sales, representing a fifth of sales increases. Meanwhile e-book advocates imagine that screen books are driving the industry and wonder why publishers remain interested in print.
E-book advocates cannot understand why dinosaur print publishers have not learned from the experience of the music industry. Well maybe they have; the music business is now worth half of what it was ten years ago and the decline doesn’t look like it will be slowing anytime soon.
“Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.” Rolling Stone
Why does print provider prosper and music provider fade? One has a killer DMR which is the physical product of the print book. How does such a constraint toggle into an attribute? All of the traits of print are constraints and it depends on how you look at digital transmission generally. The recorded music industry is faced with the disappearance of physical media. This “download dilemma”, prefigured by the demise of the compact disc, looks like the fulfillment of the digital cloud. But it also prefigures the dissolve of the physical product that sustained recorded music industry.
dark bright side
Any industry that becomes overly dependent on electronic delivery of products is doomed. The recent examples of such collapse include sectors as diverse as the automotive, music, electoral governance and finance industries. Regardless of such indicators, every sector is under pressure to embrace economies of electronic products. Slow to transform, the print publishing industry remains focused on the physical print book and has elected to apply digital technologies to production rather than to transformation of the product itself. This may prove a visionary approach.