Many of the great composers of classical music were living from writing notes. They might have been music teachers as well, or even performing as conductors or musicians, but they were hoping to get their notes published, much like today’s musicians are hoping for a record contract.

Notes were the way for people to get to know music that had been written by others, sometimes far away. If a composer was lucky, an orchestra would decide to perform the music, which would often add a considerable extra income to the patchwork of income streams. A performance would also make the music better known, which would inspire more individuals to buy the notes.

And notes were mostly bought by individuals. Not to the same extent as people today buy records (CDs or whatever format), but there was a group of people who were sufficiently wealthy to be able to have instruments and lucky enough to have time to play them, and these people bought the notes.

Even though you can still buy notes, and this indeed is happening a lot, as there are, today, many more musicians, and most of them are able to buy notes when they want, the bulk of the music industry earnings has moved to the sales of ready music – recordings.

A development that we have seen in more recent times, is the books about how to play. It may not be a new invention, but the market is flooded with such books now, and you can find a very large selection of them for the most popular instruments, and even some books dedicated to more rare instruments. The wave of self-publishing and print-on-demand has added to this, and probably many of these books do not sell many copies. A few, though, become mega-hits and sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

One such mega-hit, at least by title and concept of the series, is the “for Dummies” series. These books have been around for a long while and cover many topics, not just music, and they have something in common that most other books on the market, especially for teaching practical things, are lacking: they are readable! By this, I mean that you can use them as bed reading or bring them with you in the bus or train, as you don’t need to have the musical instrument by you when reading them. There will be at least some sections that are pure text, to be read and learned from.

The idea of being “for dummies” may not appeal to everybody – who wants to be called a dummy? But it promises that everyone can start here, which is not that stupid. Most musicians are beginners. We buy an instrument because now we want to learn how to play it, and then what? How should we proceed?

The “for Dummies” books give all kinds of information, both the silly, simple type that some more professional readers would consider too basic, and some more advanced stuff. The main idea of them seems to be to give you a lot of different aspects, at several levels, for you to get moving in your new music journey.

Not everything in such a book is necessarily complete, or even correct, and they often tend to be written by people who are known in the area the book is about, such as “guitar” or “music theory”, but these people are not automatically great writers, and they do not necessarily know everything – or they may believe that they know something which is then wrong.

They also tend to be very American. Even though not all of them have been written by Americans, many of them have, and they are not even trying to look out from that country into the rest of the world, to adapt what they are telling so that it fits the situation people there would find themselves in. There is, in other words, a lot of Americanisms and local lingo, and they often refer to places, people, products, and brands that are largely unknown outside the USA.

But for a start, or for supplement, to bring in some more aspects in your learning process, they are useful. I have several of them myself, and I generally enjoy them. I just don’t trust that what is written in them is complete and correct, so they must be combined with other reading.

The “for Dummies” books mostly have a teaching element in them, so you can learn something about how to play the guitar, for instance, from the “Guitar for Dummies” book, written by Mark Philips. It is a solid book with hundreds of pages, and if you buy the “All-in-One” edition, it covers enough stuff for you to be occupied for weeks or months with learning. And there are actually several other books in the series about the guitar or various aspects of guitar playing, so you can get them all and learn a lot, if you want.

But the structure and the way these books are written, makes them less efficient for targeted learning, where you specifically want to get up to speed on a narrow topic.

For this, there are other books. I can suggest looking at the large selection of books by Troy Nelson Music, which have various shapes and concepts, but one of the series is “Learn How To Play xx In 14 Days!” - which exist for several different instruments, and also for more specific topics for each instrument.

I have seen many comments on the internet when these books have been mentioned, and they often go like “You can’t learn how to play xx in 14 days!” – but that’s not the point of these books. They are meant to get you started. And you can get started with anything in 14 days, if you want.

The basic concept is that you’ll have 6 exercises per day, 6 days of the week, and on the 7th day, you’ll learn how to play a tune instead – making use of the things you practiced during the week. Two weeks of this, and you’re done. And you do know how to play the instrument after that, especially those two tunes, which you know and can play both through the melody voice and the accompaniment.

You also know 72 topics, that you have rehearsed during 10–15 minutes each, which is long enough to reprogram your brain from “I can’t do that” into “it’s a natural, I don’t even need to think about it”.

And, of course, if you cannot find the time (1-1.5 hours) that each day’s lessons are scheduled to take, you can spread your study thinner, doing, for instance, half of it each day – and then it will take longer.

Having such short, focused, bursts of study, is a good technique to get you started. Then you can move on with more complex and time-consuming topics after that, or you can continue in the same way, arranging your study time in a similar manner – in burst mode.

Other books are more traditional, with one book covering a sequence of different topics, such that the book in total brings you from beginner’s to intermediate level, or similar.

These are not typical, however, and the kind of book that was common some 30–40 years ago, hardly exists anymore: in big format, bound, with many pages of carefully edited and graphically designed pages – real coffee-table books, actually, but meant for speaking to the musician, making them keep up the interest while having a good experience of reading the book.

It is obvious why it has gone that way: The current books a cheaper to arrange, all the way from writing over printing and selling to delivery, and if you can sell 10 thin books about narrow topics, that will probably earn you more money than if you try to squeeze everything into one, big book.

But there are many books that are somewhere in between: slightly more pages than the narrow ones, and covering more than one topic. The publisher Hal Leonard has very many of such books, plus some of the narrow ones, while others, such as the popular publisher, Fundamental Changes, excel in the narrow ones.

The changes in the publishing industry caused by the internet include a new possibility for self-publishing all-over the globe, with included print-on-demand possibilities. While several companies have attempted to get a foothold in this new kind of publishing, it is fair to say that Amazon has run with almost all of the market.

Publishers in this sphere can be small or big, and I have actually seen some of the traditional publishers also go that way, selling some of their books through Amazon’s sales, printing, and distribution systems.

But it has additionally opened a door for individuals with a drive to begin publishing their works on their own – not having to rely on a big publisher wanting to collaborate on it.

One such publisher is Dave Brown who through his FlamencoUkulele.com site gives further information about his books, and they are all sold through Amazon. Dave Brown tells the story of him once playing the guitar, but after an accident, he couldn’t play it anymore but was able to find joy in the ukulele, and now he creates books about how to play that instrument.

Another very remarkable contributor to this scene is Ondrej Sarek, who arranges all kinds of music for a large number of different instruments, including local ones, some of which are not exactly the most typical across the world, and publishes these as books through Amazon, while showing examples from the books on YouTube. I am not sure how many books he has published so far, but it must be hundreds, and the number of videos on YouTube surpasses 1,900!

In fact, Troy Nelson, mentioned above, is also in that category, letting Amazon print and deliver all his books.

The development in the publishing industry has created some mixed publications of recorded music and books. While the era of including a CD with just about any book seems to have faded out in general, there is, luckily, still room for such projects when it makes sense.

SevenMuses MusicBooks has made an absolute gem of a little book about the Portuguese guitar, which comes with a couple of CDs containing music played with this instrument, and Fado music in general. The book is dual-language, Portuguese and English, and perhaps the translation quality lacks a bit behind now and then, but the English is fully understandable and the book is very enjoyable. The writer, Samuel Lopes, has managed to collect very many details and interesting stories that you can’t find anywhere else. This instrument and its development and use has been described in many places of the internet, but often with wrong details or a complete lack of such, so this one book is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and detailed account there is, anywhere, about this instrument, its history, who builds it, plays it, etc.

They have other books as well, all with music included, and I will definitely check out some more of them. This concept seems to have been made possible by the convergence of music recording, book publishing, and the Internet/webshops for the marketing, as it would otherwise have been a difficult thing to create and sell.

Another exciting book concept is “Fado” from earBooks, an imprint of Edel Books. It doesn’t appear on their website, so here are a couple of links to the big version and the small version (with wrong title), both through Amazon (but you can find other resellers as well). This concept is a photobook with music. You can study the history of Fado through photos from the past, carefully arranged to convey the ambience of Portugal, Lissabon, at the time, and what Fado as a music style was to fit into. The large version of the book is full of photos and has four CDs, while the smaller version has fewer photos and just one CD.

Music can be treated in books in many ways, not just as notes, as it was the case many years ago, but now also as instructions on how to play, details on how to use and care for the instrument, and many other practical things – and then additionally this kind of beauty in words and pictures.

Notes can still be bought, though, as I mentioned earlier, and this kind of publishing has diversified – you can still buy books with notes, or even individual sheets, and a large shop with such books (plus other music related items) is Musicroom, but others, like Sheet Music Direct (part of Hal Leonard) sell access to notes on a subscription basis – pay monthly, and you’ll get access to a large number of notes. There are online shops for individual sets of notes as well, typically promising something for free when you find them in a Google search, after which they quickly tell you to pay 5 dollars or similar to actually get the notes.

Publishing is not only books anymore. Publishing about music can include the music as recordings, can be the music as notes, and it can teach you how to play the music. It can take place electronically, on paper, as individual purchases or as a subscription.

If you like books and also music, you have today very good opportunities to find great books to dive into.

The Dark Middle Ages is a well-known phenomenon. We all know that expression, but I doubt that we all think about the same when hearing it.

Some people hear it as convoluted thinking, a dictatorship of the church, not allowing any modern science, poetry, or other joys.

Others, who like me studied the history of lighting, see it as really, genuinely dark because there was literally no light — only simple kinds of lighting devices existed, not enough for reading indoors, for instance. And the lack of reading then led to a lack of insight.

The windows

Sometime during the Middle Ages, the very wealthy began putting glass windows in their buildings. We speak about cathedrals and castles here, as glass was way too expensive for ordinary people, who therefore lived in houses without windows.

Obviously, a house without windows is dark inside.

It leaves the inside for such activities that do not need light. Of course, as people did have a fire, used for heating and cooking, the light from the fire would bring some level of light there, and the occasional use of torches or even candles could assist with this.

But this doesn’t bring a lot of light, not at all like a window can do. Candles were, until the beginning of the 1800s when stearin was first refined, a simple and badly burning stick of fat from one or another animal. Alternatives existed in simple oil lamps — a bowl with crude or vegetable oil and a stick or string lying in it with a fire in the end that was sticking out of the bowl. Think the typical image of Alladin’s Lamp here, but often much more simple and giving just a little light.

Even those primitive candles and simple oil lamps were not used very much due to the scarcity and high prices of their fuels. A situation that led to the grotesque scale of whale hunting that the world would eventually run into when people needed more oil.

A window, on the other hand, can let in as much light as you need — during daytime. And then you need artificial light only in the evening, which is comparably less costly to arrange.

Many materials have been used to provide a window — meaning that an opening in the wall would be covered by something to protect against the weather while still letting in some light. Most simple houses throughout the Middle Ages just didn’t have any of that.

New needs

Something happened — Gutenberg!

Not in isolation, but the possibility of printing books — making lots of them in a short time, led to people getting books. And reading them. When this became widespread, more light was needed indoors.

At the same time, it also happened that glass plates became possible — for the wealthy, as mentioned before — to buy and mount in their buildings. Even they had not done that previously, as a result of glass not being available and the need not being there. Glass did exist, though. Since the 1300s glass was produced in Venice, but further south, in Mesopotamia, it was known thousands of years ago. In the shape of plates, to use as window glass, it was known in Roman Egypt since about 2000 years ago. In the meantime, small pieces of glass were produced and used in stained-glass windows, but again, only for the wealthy.

The need for light would now trigger a need for a bigger scale production.

The misconception

In modern history, we see glass windows in common houses from about the end of the 1700s. Before that time were a couple of hundreds of years with the wealthy bragging about their wealth by putting more and more windows in their palaces.

As always, what is popular for the upper class becomes a dream, then a wish, then a demand, for the lower classes — it seeps downwards through the layers of society and becomes, eventually, a common thing.

It is common to believe that there were no clear glass windows before Venetian production started in the 1300s and that even then, it was a rare feature with only the most expensive buildings for a long while to come.

But that may be wrong.

What has now been discovered

Buildings from the Viking Age were made from wood and have long gone — it is difficult to know exactly what they looked like, as, basically, all we have left from them is the re-arrangement of earth where their main poles were dug into the ground.

Archaeologists did, however, spend a lot of time over many years to develop an understanding of what these buildings must have looked like. And since the Viking Age ended around the year 1050, when the Danes became Christian (according to historical tradition), these houses obviously didn’t have glass windows.

But now researchers are in doubt: ancient glass pieces have been found in the ground where no later castles have been, only the remains from the Viking Age, and as the glass was examined further, it could be determined that it was indeed as old as from the Viking Age.

The conclusion so far is that then, probably, glass had been used in buildings by the Vikings — long before we thought that we had glass windows.

Read more about this discovery in the article Viking Age Windows, in the Danish Journal of Archaeology.

Rounding off

It is still believed that the window glass had a very special purpose and was used only for the top of society. Also, the Vikings did get around a lot — they have evidently visited the Mediterranean area and could have brought home some glass from there.

An interesting “side conclusion” by the scientists is that it is unlikely that such a thing as window glass is achieved from plundering — it is more likely that the Vikings got it through trading, which then could require an adjustment of the general view of Vikings as brutal and unrefined people.

But I am more fascinated by the fact that one piece of glass could indicate many, even if they have not yet been found. And that could indicate a more widespread use of indoor light for a much longer span of time than we believed until now.

Making the Middle Ages less dark, and, hence, the time of Enlightenment less significant.

As an additional comment: recent years of archaeological research have shown how people in Denmark had genuine trade relationships with the Romans — making them a bit more advanced and developed than the traditional view would know. This new bit about the glass just adds to that development in the understanding of history.

A light has been lit for a large part of history that used to be dark.

For most writers, getting known - getting in touch with an audience - is the main challenge. Of course, writing in itself can be seen as a challenge, but since a writer probably starts writing in the first place because they know something about how to write, the main challenges lie outside the trade itself.

Marketing

Somehow, that word marketing sounds reasonable to most people when something is to be sold. They must take the product to the market, convince potential buyers that they should buy it, and buy it now. It can take many steps to make that happen, and some of them are really far away from the writing work itself, which can make any writer very frustrated - how can they possibly be good at everything in the world? 

Writing, designing a cover page for their book, laying out the contents, getting an ISBN, finding places to self-publish, or even trying to get an agreement with a publishing company. And then marketing on top.

The old days

But what they sometimes forget is that it never really was like that. The great writers during all times, or those writers we today remember as great, they were often not marketing their books in a traditional sense - they were simply taking part in community matters, the public debate.

Most of the famous writers are today known for their letters, their excentric behaviour, their political involvement, or their love affairs. Next to their books, of course. 

In the 19^th century, there was only a fraction of the people on Earth that we can count today. Maybe 1 billion, as compared to today’s 8 billions. Most of these people didn’t even take part in society outside their closest circles, and they have simply vanished from history - there is nothing special to tell about them, so nobody does.

It was easier for those who were part of the bigger circles, the cultural spheres, to get attention. When we today see (or don’t see but know, statistically, the existence of) millions of hopeful writers, there were just a few in the old days. Everybody knew about them, as they were talked about, mentioned in the newspapers, and meeting other people.

Life was slower then. There wasn’t the same kind of urgency as, and therefore it was considered acceptable, that writing a book, finding a publisher, and going through the planning and publishing process was often taking several years.

The new days

Today, the world is very much different. Everything is in contrast.

We are more busy. With fierce competition comes ideas of “time-to-market” as logical extensions to the already compressed schedule of writing — and such ideas like NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) have indicated that a book can be written much faster than the old rumours said, where it was common to proceed slowly, spending years, before deciding that the book was ready. Social media and the idea of publishing something often, to not be forgotten by the followers, has left an impression of writing non-stop to be the normal.

But more important: many more people are taking part in what we could call modern life. Many more are included in the cultural spheres, and many more can spend time and money on writing - buying needed tools, such as a computer and an internet connection, and everybody can easily find the information needed to get started - with writing and with dreaming of success.

When the world of writers has expanded from a few hundreds or perhaps thousands over some years, who everybody else had heard about - into a situation where millions are writing without ever being known to anyone - we cannot expect the old ways of spreading the word about a new book to function any more.

Communities

Enter clubs, communities, and other social networks. With such arrangements, you can become a big fish in a small pond, rather than a small fish in a vast ocean of writers. You can have a name among the few others in your chosen community, and you and the others can support each other with friendship, practical assistance of various kinds, you can read each other’s books, and you can basically all together simulate the smaller society of the 19^th century.

Because, let’s face it: Your alternative marketing that goes out in the world, trying to target everybody, has tough competition from those millions of other writers who are doing the same. So, it is not strange that the idea of “followers” has taken off: it offers exactly that microcosmos you’ll need to be that big fish.

The communities available today are many, and each of them often host sub-communities, such as your own followings or separate groups or “publications” or whatever it can be called on each of them.

Personally, I take part in very many, at varying levels, and they include such as Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, The Multilingual Writers’ Community, Poets & Writers, and more. In each of these communities, there will be inspiration for books that others have written - and a chance for writers to mention their own books or other writings without necessarily engaging in advanced marketing activities.

It works! Many books are today being sold mainly to the communities that the writer belongs to, meaning that we really do not have one world, one writing universe, but a multiverse of writers’ communities.

Who thrives there

It can be difficult over several years to remember exactly where you first ran into a writer, but for me, when I bought books 30 years ago, they were most often recommended by the publishers - through catalogues or library presence, or book clubs that sent a bunch of books regularly. So I got to know many writers this way.

But today, most of the new writers I get to know - along with their books - are from the communities in which I take part. Either they are themselves members, or they are mentioned by peer community members.

This way, I have come to know about great writers like Philip Charter, Vicky Randle, Veronica Llorca Smith, Olga Melnyk, John Ilho, Cormac McCarthy, and many more. 

Publishing

When the old publishing companies bought each other, grew bigger, and at the same time saw a decline in the sales of traditional books - being too slow to adapt to the electronic revolution - they began filtering the incoming requests from writers in such a way that mainly just people who are already famous will get published. They do not have an interest in small names, so they just say no to those.

Indie publishers have appeared, and while it may be easier for writers to get published with these, they most often do not have a big reach - meaning that they do not sell many books organically and will depend on the writers themselves to do a lot of marketing for each book.

Self-publishing is easy, available for everybody, and for electronic books, at least, the distribution channels are there already, well-established and well-functioning. But they do zero marketing for a writer, and here, the community comes in at its full strength: because the community can help not only by reading, reviewing, and spreading the word, but also by actually buying the book.

The future

The world never became that global village, we talked about some years ago. While we do have access to communicate with a large part of the world’s population, we don’t know these people. We cannot know all of them.

Also, we see (to my big and sincere regret) a movement in the world away from internationalization and collaboration across borders. We see nationalism, isolationism, and other means of restricting how much contact we’ll have with people far away. Part of this probably because there are too many actively participating people in the world now for anyone to handle. So, we split the world into smaller pieces. Physically, by building walls and restricting immigration, and mentally, by locking ourselves up to communication in certain forums only, building our tribes and followings, and settle with a perceived smaller world for our activities.

The future belongs to communities, for very many practical purposes, including publishing. Writers will have to pick some and live with them, be part of them, and then only at rare occasions manage to get an influence that stretches beyond these, their own communities.

Since Gutenberg, we have had printed books around. In the beginning, these were mostly bibles, then came other types, and during the Age of Enlightenment, publishing went up to speed with lots of both scientific and fictional books.

That was the rise. 

And then it became hype: we saw the period of the great writers, still being read today, and there was a good balance between books written and people who wanted to read. It became a golden age of publishing, and several big publishing houses were established during those years.

When we entered into the modern industrialization and internationalization period after WWII, things escalated, like they always do, as it became cheaper to arrange for the printing and distribution of books. Book stores across the world had a surge, but soon the storm increased in strength and book clubs were established that spew out huge amounts of books at low prices. These were called clubs, but they were businesses with subscribing customers. Many of the books published by the book clubs were the classics, now available without royalties, or they were massive sellers that publishers saw a chance to give another boost by allowing for these low-cost productions by the book clubs.

The hype was an indication of the world of publishing coming to an end. It is said that every technology is reaching its high just before it disappears from the marked, being replaced by a new technology. I think that this can extend to business ideas as well, not just technologies.

And in this case, things clashed, as the personal computers and home computers came along, and then the Internet, followed by a mobile phone concept that quickly became that of the smartphone. Combined, these made up a technological platform portfolio that was designed to smash every other information spreading mechanism. Including the traditional publishing.

The hype of printed books boiled over and declined while the e-books came along, and then audio books. Bot not only did the technology rip off books from their traditional paper, it also gave books the competition of several other attention thieves such as TV and movies through first simple antennas, then satellites and cables, video cassettes, DVDs/Blu-rays, moving through various schemes of planned distribution to ownership, rental and streaming on-demand.

Of course, the ease and low cost of printing books would lead to excessive production, and of course new technologies and business ideas would lead to competing concepts.

Bookstores began closing. This phenomenon is seen to different extent in different parts of the world, and I suspect that some people have not noticed it - as they live in places that still have physical bookstores around. But for others, physical books have vanished almost completely from the market. 

When books were new as a concept, it was considered special and good style to have books visibly present at the office and in the home. Now, books have become an embarrassment to many, and after the book club years with a bookshelf in every home, even the home of a worker family without any academic or literary background, that is now a thing of the past. Instead, people have big screen TVs and smartphones, supplemented with tablets and laptop computers.

Books are still being published, and perhaps even more than ever, because it has become possible to do so easily and without first going through a tedious process of applying and then being rejected from publisher after publisher. With a few clicks on the mouse, writers can now self-publish.

There are several platforms for these e-book self-publications, and even though one of them has become the biggest there are still alternatives - or supplements - for the adventurous writers to explore.

Writing and preparing the books are also easier than ever. Tools like word processors made it possible to edit a book without writing it again on new paper, as it was necessary in the typewriter days, and spell checkers, grammar checkers, various project management tools and similar have entered the scene, and most recently also generative artificial intelligence tools are taking off some of the workload from the writer’s shoulders, and every task related to graphics design can be handled by a bunch of tools with various degrees of automation, some requiring very little knowledge from the user. All of these tools make it possible to do everything without the assistance or, indeed, the approval of others.

Writers are, as a result, producing extreme amounts of books. It is not unusual to find writers who send out five or ten books per year, having 50 or more books on the market. Even people who cannot write or who have nothing to say are capable of producing books, for instance in the shape of “low contents book” that can be anything like, for instance, a copybook with a few added notes and guides, or something else that count as books in the overall scenario without requiring an authoring process. Anything that needs printing can be done so by print-on-demand services, still arranged by the writers themselves and made available through online bookstores. Audio book versions can be made just as easily, just by pushing a few buttons on a publishing platform.

Books are now there in huge amounts. Old books from the time where a writer needed to put in a lot of work on the writing itself and then being lucky to find an interested publisher, after which they had to go through a lot of work together around editing and planning. Newer books from the book club period, printed in extreme amounts, are now being inherited by the children of the original buyers - children who grew up with electronic entertainment and no bookshelves. And all the e-books, of course, plus all the audio books.

When paper books are inherited, the heirs are often not interested in them. They see no value whatsoever in paper books, so they want to dispose of them. After many years of antiquarians as important secondhand stores of valuable old books, it looks like even these have hard times. A book club book never had any second hand (economical) value, but now all the other books have lost their value as well. So the heirs throw away the books.

The physical book disposals have reached a grotesque level in some places, where the recycling stations or garbage disposal sites, whatever they are called locally, have special dumping areas for books, special containers. Once there were containers for newspapers, but these have been replaced by containers for books.

The society by large is doing what Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451: even though the books are not being burned in front of people, including the houses where the books were found, the books are still being burned - now in power plants, becoming electricity or district heating. And the books are now only remembered, not by people, like in Fahrenheit 451, but by computers. 

There are many topics in this! There is a big world of book stories. Many stories to tell. As a strange irony of life, it may be difficult to reach any readers with these and other stories, because of the almost complete decline of paper books as a concept, and the current extreme publication level of e-books. A book about book stories could easily be dragged down by the maelstrom, never meeting the eyes of any readers.

Most e-books are given away of sold very cheaply, and most copies are never being read. 

Newspapers and magazines have undergone a similar development, apart from the volume - there isn’t a similar motivation among writers to create news outlets as there is to create books, and whatever still exists in this segment has few buyers and even fewer readers. Blogging platforms, social media and similar compensate a bit for all this, but there is a strong focus in these places to produce lightweight texts that, according to the advice of most coaches and influencers in the field, “shouldn’t be taken too seriously”.  

Any serious attempt to uncover the stories of the books will not really fit in anywhere today. It will have severe problems finding an audience. Or that is…:

Book Stories, a series of articles of which you are now reading the introduction, is an attempt to gather stories about books and publishing, about the hopes and dreams, the values, the trouble and fears, and the different uses, the different positions and roles of books in the mental model that people in different societies have had over time.

And about the future. 

Do books have a future? Yes, that is the magic of it all. Waves are going high - and equally low - that is what makes them waves. But the ocean continues being there. Out there, deep into the open sea, you’ll find a future for the books. And I am not talking about a hidden island or a sunken ship - I am talking about the true minds of people. Those minds that are not being dragged along by social media’s short and unserious texts and the news media’s quick blows of silly or fake news but are seeking something genuine.

If you follow along, you will find stories about books. Thoughts about publishing. Inspiration and considerations showing that books and the book world, whatever it may look like in the future, still exist.