>In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- brea

>In Germany during the same period, publishers had plagiarizers -- who could reprint each new publication and sell it cheaply without fear of punishment -- breathing down their necks. Successful publishers were the ones who took a sophisticated approach in reaction to these copycats and devised a form of publication still common today, issuing fancy editions for their wealthy customers and low-priced paperbacks for the masses. Not only that but there would be incentive for every printer to print everything they could get their hands on, in quantities enough to saturate the markets, with the quickest to act at scale gaining the market share advantage. Knowing people, this could give an exponentially unfair disadvantage to cultures which restricted this type of activity beyond a certain extent. >The prospect of a wide readership motivated scientists in particular to publish the results of their research. In Höffner's analysis, "a completely new form of imparting knowledge established itself. Essentially the only method for disseminating new knowledge that people of that period had known was verbal instruction from a master or scholar at a university. Now, suddenly, a multitude of high-level treatises circulated throughout the country. It was like they got the "information superhighway" of the horse-and-buggy era exclusively without parallel, and new scientific data (always controversial in some way) was heavily involved consuming significant bandwidth, plus an ever-increasing multitude of users rapidly consuming information & new sources arising (so things could go viral) like never before. Maybe even allowing for some deeper kind of echo chamber to have more widespread resoundment. It would also seem like any division between the well-informed and the badly-misinformed could be magnified. What could go wrong? Then when copyrights did become established, the flow of new scientific information was badly choked so people just had to make do with the old stuff. Still that might be a more informed (or misinformed as the case may be) position than others who had never had any period of information freedom at all.