Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
That's not entirely the case, since it was "religious zealots" like Christian monks and Islamic scholars who actually did the work of protecting and re-copying texts -- including a few as disruptive as Satyricon. AFAIK Japan never had an equivalent to Qin Shi Huang, but many cultural writings are still lost.
Books have been lost or destroyed for many reasons, none of which are simple....
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No, the reasons are not simple, but saying that Christian monks and Islamic scholars protected ancient "pagan" writings is akin to saying that Josef Mengele protected the subjects of his experiments from the gas chambers.
Religious zealots have always engaged in destroying competing ideas, and the Christian and the Islamic ones have been more successful than many.
An important reason why more was not destroyed is that parchment was expensive, so that old manuscripts which were not burned, were collected to be later scraped and reused for pious writings.
Of course, some ancient authors were accepted and copied and studied by the zealots and the religious establishment, but they were few and far between.
As to preserving works in the digital age, I'd imagine that stuff worth preserving will survive well. DRM can of course make it more difficult, but hey, may be some authors will have to thank file-sharing for their immortality....
