Too many ebooks … according to Alexander Pope

Do you ever worry there are too many ebooks? The internet has made publishing almost costless, which means that anybody with a thought in mind can plunk away at a keyboard and send it out to all the world. Not everybody is enthused by this state of affairs. See Bill Keller of the New York Times, or this piece from Bertram’s Blog which extrapolates from existing publishing data to estimate that there may have been as many as 15,000,000 books published in 2012. Whether it relates to ebooks or physical paper books, the complaint is not new. Kent Larsen notes a similar complaint from one John Taylor in 1842. But it goes back long before that.

Writing nearly 300 years ago in the 2^nd edition to Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1729), “Martinus Scriblerus” offers this complaint:

We shall next declare the occasion and the cause which moved our Poet to this particular work. He lived in those days when (after providence had permitted the Invention of Printing as a scourge for the Sins of the learned) Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge of authors cover’d the land: Whereby not only the peace of the honest unwriting subject was daily molested, but unmerciful demands were made of his applause, yea of his money, by such as would neither earn the one, or deserve the other; At the same time, the Liberty of the Press was so unlimited that it grew dangerous to refuse them either: For they would forthwith publish slanders unpunish’d, the authors being anonymous; nay the immediate publishers thereof lay sculking under the wings of an Act of Parliament, assuredly intended for better purposes.

cited in Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy

In his 2009 copyright screed, conservative writer, Mark Helprin, complains about the blog. He could just as easily have been writing about the ebook. The similarity in tone and spirit is striking:

And then there is the effect of the mechanism itself on the quality of its output. How do you attract attention to your “blog”? (I put the word in quotation marks not in an attempt to delegitimatize it—it is perfectly legitimate—but to quarantine it because it is so ugly that other words should be protected from it. Were it a weaker and more vulnerable thing rather than like a brutally triumphant Teuton drunkenly trampling the undergarments of the Vestal Virgins, it might deserve some pity. But it doesn’t.) The question remains, how do you attract attention to your “blog” when there are a hundred million others? You can concentrate on quality, fill a niche or a greater need, and invest the time, money, and work to make it stand out, as many have done, although with no guarantee of success. Or, you can make it sensational, appealing to whatever it is that for obvious reasons will immediately turn our attentions from just about anything to violence, threat, insanity, or sex. That is why television’s mainstays are dead bodies, teasingly exposed bosoms, and exploding cars. And so, in “blogging,” as in much else, begins the mad race to the bottom. Blogging’s anonymity makes it the intellectual twin of road rage. But unlike road rage it is not and cannot be subject to law. The only defense against its lowliness is to know it for what it is and call it thus.

The world appears to have survived too much freedom of expression in Pope’s day. I have every confidence it will survive in ours as well.