Soon after Gutenberg's invention of movable type, the Abbot of Sponheim, Johannes Trithemius, wrote a tract in 1492, called In Defence of Scribes, in which he urged that the scribal tradition be maintained because the very act of handcopying sacred texts brought spiritual enlightenment. Unfortunately, his message was severely compromised when he had the book set in movable type so his message could be spread quickly and cheaply. This incident is mentioned 500 years later in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody ( a title taken from Joyce's Finnegans Wake). Jefferies (The Guardian) comments that some irony lurks in Shirky's production of a traditional book that is hardly an exemplar of the mass collaborations that are his book's subject. Maybe this can be coined "Pulling a Sponheim."More interestingly, this loss of the scriveners' trade highlights a more modern loss to audiophiles in the transition to file sharing of MP3 music files, sans artwork, sans liner notes. What would Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band be without those liner notes ? This MP3-driven takeover was a classic example of good enough is good enough. Today's youth do not think in terms of buying a physical object that contains a finite number of songs arbitrarily selected by someone else. And that is a sad loss for the art of music.
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