I Miss Microsoft Encarta

Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by dredmorbius on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:01AM (#20745219)

I'm compressing thoughts for brevity. The codex, handwritten, allowed random access, but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy. They were chained, the language was standardised -- you brought readers to the work (Latin) rather than works to readers (vernacular).

Moveable type, cheap paper, mass literacy, vernacular language, typographic conventions, high-speed presses, and mass distribution, create a wholly different impact.

As Elizabeth Eisenstein noted, the printing press is an agent of social change. Generalised, all comms tech is.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by thaumasiotes on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @12:57PM (#20759044)

> The codex, handwritten, allowed random access

So do scrolls. You're not supposed to open the entire scroll at once. The codex is better at this.

> but was still phenomenally expensive to create. On the order of a million dollars per copy.

This is nonsense. You can prepare a very expensive book, but you don't have to. The idea that books were necessarily earth-shakingly expensive to create conflicts with the known reality of commercial popular novels in the ancient world.

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