Gutenberg innovated printing around 1440. At that time an average book cost around 135 days of labor, ranging from 15 days for a short book to 256 days for a major work. Working eight hours a day, an average book would cost 1,080 hours. Today, blue-collar hourly compensation (wages and benefits) is around $32.54. That would put the money price of a typical book at $35,143 today if there had been no book innovation since 1439.
On July 4, 1971 Michael S. Hart created one of the first ebooks when he typed the Declaration of Independence on his computer and distributed the file to all of his friends. He went on to found Project Gutenberg with the goal to encourage the creation and free distribution of eBooks. In the last 50 years with the help of thousands of volunteers, they have created a 67,000 volume library of literature, reference works, and more, in over 60 languages and dialects.
Before Gutenberg and his press and Hart and his computer, it would cost $2,354,594,400 to have a 67,000 volume library. Today it is almost to free. As Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Romer would say, knowledge has increasing returns. Knowledge tends to make it easier to create and discover new knowledge. Knowledge can go exponential.
In 2022 we can all enjoy reading a great book for free and use our extra 1,080 hours to create some valuable new knowledge to share.
Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.
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