3 ms·

It also doesn't cover correlation/causation. Did the book boom cause their industrialization, or did the mass industrialization cause the book boom?

notahacker 16y ago
It seems far more plausible that there was an exogenous factor causing the book boom in Germany: the number of Germans that actually knew how to read The article hints at this when it suggests a German earned more in royalties (without effective copyright) for a treatise on leather tanning at the beginning of the century than Mary Shelley did for Frankenstein. Either UK publishers were exceptionally bad at maximising revenue (or sharing it with authors), or there was a much greater demand for books in Germany which had little to do with the supply of cheap copies A highly plausible explanation is that German appetite for reading was driven by compulsory state-sponsored primary education, contrasting with the part-time, parochial education available in the UK at the time. Despite low literacy rates the UK did a pretty impressive job of industrialising in the 20th century; to argue otherwise is to ignore the rate of absolute progress in favour of dubious relative metrics in the manner of Wired's recent "web is dead".
- ugh 16y ago
  Oh, the UK’s industry was and still is impressive. But the German states were far, far, far behind in the 19th century. It’s just surprising that they could catch up at all.
  - Gormo 16y ago
    It's not really that suprising. Industrialization originated in the UK, and emerged gradually from the economic and cultural situation there without any intentional design. When the Germans began industrializing, the UK's industry was mature and well-developed, which provided a very detailed practical example to reference. 19th-century Germany and Japan and modern China have all had the ability to work directly toward a goal, rather than having to wait for industrialization to emerge naturally from within their own economies (although if they had, it would probably have produced a set of customs and practices much more suited to their own cultures and economic conditions).
Gormo 16y ago
Whether they're correlated at all is a valid question, but I don't think you can argue that mass industrialization of Germany caused the book boom, considering that the book boom started over a century before mass industrialization began in earnest.

notahacker 16y ago

It seems far more plausible that there was an exogenous factor causing the book boom in Germany: the number of Germans that actually knew how to read The article hints at this when it suggests a German earned more in royalties (without effective copyright) for a treatise on leather tanning at the beginning of the century than Mary Shelley did for Frankenstein. Either UK publishers were exceptionally bad at maximising revenue (or sharing it with authors), or there was a much greater demand for books in Germany which had little to do with the supply of cheap copies A highly plausible explanation is that German appetite for reading was driven by compulsory state-sponsored primary education, contrasting with the part-time, parochial education available in the UK at the time. Despite low literacy rates the UK did a pretty impressive job of industrialising in the 20th century; to argue otherwise is to ignore the rate of absolute progress in favour of dubious relative metrics in the manner of Wired's recent "web is dead".

ugh 16y ago
Oh, the UK’s industry was and still is impressive. But the German states were far, far, far behind in the 19th century. It’s just surprising that they could catch up at all.
- Gormo 16y ago
  It's not really that suprising. Industrialization originated in the UK, and emerged gradually from the economic and cultural situation there without any intentional design. When the Germans began industrializing, the UK's industry was mature and well-developed, which provided a very detailed practical example to reference. 19th-century Germany and Japan and modern China have all had the ability to work directly toward a goal, rather than having to wait for industrialization to emerge naturally from within their own economies (although if they had, it would probably have produced a set of customs and practices much more suited to their own cultures and economic conditions).

Gormo 16y ago

Whether they're correlated at all is a valid question, but I don't think you can argue that mass industrialization of Germany caused the book boom, considering that the book boom started over a century before mass industrialization began in earnest.