A brief history:
At its root, the word Publish means, “to make public.”
Before the advent of printing, manuscripts were hand-written. If an author wanted to publish a manuscript (make it public), he simply did so. If he wanted to publish additional copies of his work, he could make more—or hire a scribe to do it for him. All publishing, at the time, was self-publishing; this was the first kind of publishing.
Of course scribes could make and distribute copies of anything. In that sense, I suppose, they were the first commercial publishers. Not that publishing was big business. In those days most people couldn’t read or write.
Enter Johannes Gutenberg, who, in about 1439, invented the movable type printing press. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this occurrence in history. Certainly this one event played a key role in the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the spread of learning to the masses, among other things. It also ushered in the age of specialization—at least insofar as publishing is concerned.
An educated populace resulted in a demand for books. And the availability of the technology to print books in quantity caused a paradigm shift to occur: From the standpoint of both time and expense, it was no longer practical to hand-copy manuscripts. Pity the poor scribes who thought they could go on forever operating on the old paradigm. Lacking the political influence to obtain government bailouts, they went out of business.
Writers write: on its face a simple statement, but one that is profound in its implication. It is not a universal truth, but, generally speaking, those who are gifted with the ability to tell a story or to teach through their writing typically are not gifted in the production of printed books, and vice-versa. This does not make one group better than the other, it’s just the way it is—and it’s pretty much always been that way. So, if an author wanted a book to appear in print, he was obliged to hire a specialist—a printer.
At some point, it became clear that the market for books was wider than just the immediate region in which the author lived, and publishing as we now know it was born. Authors became, to use modern terminology, content providers. The printing, distribution, and sale of books became the province of others. These others became the middlemen of the printed word, adding additional layers of specialization into the equation.
This was not an altogether bad thing. True, the middlemen got some of the profit, but the author had the opportunity to reach a much broader audience than he might otherwise have done. So authors needed publishers and publishers needed authors and life was good.
Stay tuned for part two.
SDG
