One interesting implication of this logic is that an ancient society could lower the price of books by achieving a critical mass of literate people. Because a literate person can spawn other literate people, and these literate people can in turn be set to work copying books which the entire community can then read, loaning them back and forth hundreds or thousands of times...
This explains how the ancient scholars managed to get anything done in the first place. It's all about the density. This is why the Library of Alexandria had so much stronger a reputation than the Library of Congress does today: The Library of Congress is great, but since each of the works in it is a printed work with potentially many other extant copies, it's not the same level of unique resource.
Obviously it didn't do you as much good to train a literate person if they then journeyed away to a distance where you could neither lend them your books nor borrow theirs. Not only would that person not contribute to your local library, but they would also be forced to spend a great deal of their precious education time copying out the two or three vital books that would sustain them in their isolation: The Bible, plus maybe one of the classical legal or medical treatises. You tended to end up with the same handful of books distributed over the landscape. Which suggests that the key problem which put the "dark" in the "dark ages" was not some kind of barbarian hatred of learning: It was the collapse of Roman civic society and the spreading of scholars thinly over the landscape. When the central authority with the power to collect taxes from an entire empire, drag those taxes to Rome, and use them to support a sizeable class of co-located educated people collapsed, so did the intellectual standard. Also explains why the centers of higher learning became associated with the Church: The Duke of Normandy could only tax Normandy, but the Church could collect tithes across political boundaries and pool them.
Application of this kind of logic to, say, Wikipedia or the open source movement is left as an exercise for the reader.
This explains how the ancient scholars managed to get anything done in the first place. It's all about the density. This is why the Library of Alexandria had so much stronger a reputation than the Library of Congress does today: The Library of Congress is great, but since each of the works in it is a printed work with potentially many other extant copies, it's not the same level of unique resource.
Obviously it didn't do you as much good to train a literate person if they then journeyed away to a distance where you could neither lend them your books nor borrow theirs. Not only would that person not contribute to your local library, but they would also be forced to spend a great deal of their precious education time copying out the two or three vital books that would sustain them in their isolation: The Bible, plus maybe one of the classical legal or medical treatises. You tended to end up with the same handful of books distributed over the landscape. Which suggests that the key problem which put the "dark" in the "dark ages" was not some kind of barbarian hatred of learning: It was the collapse of Roman civic society and the spreading of scholars thinly over the landscape. When the central authority with the power to collect taxes from an entire empire, drag those taxes to Rome, and use them to support a sizeable class of co-located educated people collapsed, so did the intellectual standard. Also explains why the centers of higher learning became associated with the Church: The Duke of Normandy could only tax Normandy, but the Church could collect tithes across political boundaries and pool them.
Application of this kind of logic to, say, Wikipedia or the open source movement is left as an exercise for the reader.