Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
No, we didn't.
Writers were either independently wealthy or had patrons who gave them sinecures. No one was able to make a living as a writer until the copyright act was passed.
John Milton (who lived before the copyright act) made 5 pounds from the first edition of "Paradise Lost."
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You're attempting to rewrite history here. Besides that the source of the actual income is irrelevant, if we're defining who could actually live off writing, it's just plain factually inaccurate.
After the introduction of paper presses, which must be seen as the milestone for making books commercially available to the public. Many authors, publishers etc. made a good living for several hundreds of years.
It's actually an interesting fact that with the introduction of Copyright in the UK in 1710. The UK compared to Germany who did NOT introduce copyright for another 127 years, experienced an increase in price, a reduction of actual works being made, and a steep reduction of the actual works reaching the public.
Germany with no copyright laws flourished however, outputting 10 times more original works pr. year. As for the individual authors earnings. Sigismund Hermbstädt, an unknown chemistry and pharmacy professor in Berlin, earned more royalties for his "Principles of Leather Tanning" published in 1806 than British author Mary Shelley did for her horror novel "Frankenstein," which is still famous today.
Whats interesting is that they had to deal with MANY of the problems copyright defenders worry about today, like others copying their work and selling it for a profit. They had to find ways around this by actually developing smarter business models, creating fancy editions for their wealthy customers and mass produce cheap paperbacks for the common workers.
Here's an interesting article about the situation for those actually wanting to read more about it:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...710976,00.html
In closing I'd like to say that:
There's no virtue to high priced books
On the contrary, in a historical content, high priced book hurts everyone except the publishers. EVEN the authors.