@cstross @jdnicoll I don't think publishing consolidation/being at the peak of the mammonite surge helps at all, but this has always happened; on the writing side, reading is so much faster than writing there's an inherent supply problem, and on the business side there's this major cultural shift going on. (I think "never been lost" was your observation; "grew up swimming in the sum of human knowledge AND the malice of morgoth" is as new a thing as printing was in Gutenberg's time.)