That’s the guiding premise for university professors. And, broadly speaking, so it is also for the major media and entertainment companies, which – in this digital age of bits and bytes – might accurately be said to publish movies, television programs, recorded music, and games, much as they might publish books or magazines. Nowadays, all information, or content, is reducible, copyable, and transportable into the same raw material of bits and bytes, no matter what the original form.

First words

The first published work – one of great significance because of its authorship, content, and form of delivery – was chiseled in stone and delivered from Mount Sinai by Moses. One might quip that, for the publishing industry, after delivery of the Ten Commandments, it’s been downhill ever since.

Still, from the drawings of early cavemen, to the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, and then on to the first printed book, it is evident that people have always had a need to communicate with each other by publishing their thoughts, plans, and histories. Printing had already been developed in China in the sixth century AD. But it wasn’t until the year 1455 – when a German pioneer by the name of Johannes Gutenberg and his partner, Johann Fust, set up a movable metal-type press to print a Latin Bible – that the modern publishing era began. Today, world spending on books is estimated at $100 billion, of which approximately 35% is generated in the United States, where more than 150,000 titles a year (about the same as in the United Kingdom) are published.