Publishers Gave Away 123M Books During World War II | Hacker News Reader

Publishers Gave Away 123M Books During World War II

theatlantic.com

89 pointsjrslv10 comments

Interesting side note: German publishers hit on a similar strategy in the early post-war years. Nobody could afford to buy hardcovers anymore, so they printed their books on newspaper-paper instead, to be sold cheaply at the roadside - and thrived.

> so they printed their books on newspaper-paper

That's called newsprint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsprint

Very interesting. I wonder if something similar could happen today...digital or our paper, books have so much to compete with for peoples' attention.

I think we as a society could really use it.

> I think we as a society could really use it.

Definitely. I think books are by far the most effective way of giving people a real education. There's nothing like a good collection of books for teaching you knowledge, broadening your worldview and making you a thinking citizen.

Books are more available now than they ever were before - just think Project Gutenberg. Unfortunately, we lack the general culture of serious reading that would be needed to fully make use of that potential.

It's not just culture, even many people who love to read, find it difficult to read among all the distractions and the impact of the net.

It is funny how "giving away a book" has changed meaning since then.

Today, "giving away 1 book" is easily understood as potentially indefinite copies of a single work, but the headline here refers to 123 million, physical copies of a much smaller amount of works.

Since it came with the WWII context and the 123M number, it didn't even occur to me that today we'd read it differently, but you're right--if it were about today, and about <500 books, I'd think it was giving copyright. (At higher numbers, I'd assume physical copies unless it explicitly said copyright.)

Many books were "given away" (forced) and burnt in fires at Reichskristallnacht Nov 1938: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

Many thousands years old historic books, papyrus papers were destroyed amd vanished forever.

The future dystopian version of that: you wake up one morning to find out that all your e-books have self destructed based on a remote command embedded in your reader that would otherwise allow a retraction by the publisher.

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/amazons-remote-wipe-of-customer...

That's the present dystopia. The future dystopia is that off-message books get censored and rewritten on your device without you ever knowing.. or is that also the present dystopia? :)

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