Longreads + Open Thread

Shopify, Spam, Fintech, Oil, China, Revenue, Degrowth, Books

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Longreads

Books

The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives: Oil is not the only product whose history can anchor a broader one. This book covers the history of the book business, with a lot of focus on books as a business. They're important cultural artifacts and they're repositories for the most significant discoveries ever made, but they're also something that gets made, or doesn't, based on the vagaries of the capital cycle and unit economics.

The early chapters are the most fun, because they show just how complicated it was to get a book made, both as a pure business matter and as a logistical challenge. Books had to be typeset, illustrations made (and reused), paper and ink acquired, etc. (One of the ways the business had to develop over time was to figure out what the right bundle ways: early on, binding a book was separate from buying the pages.)

Books were also an early instance of international supply chains, for equipment, materials, content, and talent. A Dutch printer might use a German press to relay an English translation of a French story onto Italian paper. The ink was usually local, but everything else could come from all over.

This is a good history, though it loses some momentum as the product it's talking about matures. What offsets this is that it's full of character portraits for people who mostly aren't well-documented enough to get a biography on their own, but who provide lots of vignettes that keep things interesting. All that progress in the art of wrapping knowledge between covers was the cumulative work of many interesting lives.

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