> A full book manuscript is tiny, and requires zero spinup whatsoever, unless you count opening a PDF or DOCX file as such.

That is not uncommon, but neither is it the quantitative norm. A lot of authors are particular about the typesetting of their documents, and it does require a rendering environment.

It isn't unusual for a half-LaTeX half-something-else monstrosity to be rendered in a semi-custom environment. Especially if you're dealing with anything academic.

In those kinds of environments you may have a ton of assets, like graphs, that may either be large file-sizes, and/or re-generated during the rendering process from various large datasets. Those assets are not small, and may prevent you holding much more than a couple books on your $4 thumb drive.

If you have to use an academic, LaTeX monstrosity as an example to even somewhat limit the number of books you can store for a few dollars, surely we can just agree that the cost of storage is inconsequential compared to what an author will produce over their career output?

Perhaps. But months and years down the line, recreating an environment to regenerate the book can take considerable effort.

I have a book that is generated from a sqlite database, and is dependent on a certain version range of Scribus and Lilypond. It would take me days to get a setup that would work for me to make changes to it, but it saved me years of work in the initial edition.

That's not exactly typical, to be fair.

It gets worse. There was Python, elisp, Lilypond . . . it was a whole thing. But what I describe above is just what it would take to make changes now.

And what if you _didn’t know_ your “career depended on it?” What then?

Does “readily available” equate to “on your person at all times?” I’m sure the greats all did so before flash drives of sufficient capacity were available, right?

Should a professional accountant keep copies of all the tax returns they prepared, on a flash drive that’s with them at all times, in case a client gets audited? Should I keep a copy of every line of code I ever wrote? Where does this professional responsibility end for you?

I've written and published myself. Keeping manuscripts handy is part of the job. The problems mentioned in the twitter thread didn't exist before digital distribution, so what authors did beforehand is a bit of a non-sequitur. There were fewer of them, and the ones that made a living by it had real support on the business side of things, something vanishingly rare nowadays.

Accountants are required by law to maintain a minimum of seven years' worth of records for exactly that reason.

Fundamentally, if you want to sell a book you've written, no one is going to care more than you. That means that if you're a small, unsupported author (the vast majority of cases), it's on you to take care of the annoyances that come along for the ride. That's the nature of work. That flagging can be used as a form or harassment is a genuine problem- this is an inevitable side-effect of systems designed for pure automation, without a human in the loop to provide feedback. Over-reliance on automation is an issue that goes far beyond the world of publishing. That is orthogonal to the issue of being responsible for one's own creation, in terms of having needed resources on-hand.

Would you have your portfolio on your person at all times? Probably not, but you wouldn't go on a long trip without it. If you were actively working you'd have it available. If you didn't have it, you'd accept the risk of losing a contract or having your work temporarily withdrawn from sale. Maybe a bookseller would notice typos in your current edition and takes your book off the shelves until you can make a revised edition.

I mean, fundamentally, if you're saying your book needs to be on sale 24/7/365 then you need to be standing behind it 24/7/365 or paying a person or organisation to do that for you. If you want to take a break from the business of your book you should be prepared for Amazon to do the same.