“ Books had existed prior to Gutenberg, but they were not widely written and they were not widely read. Instead, they were luxury items for the nobility, produced one copy at a time by scribes. The going rate for reproducing a single manuscript was about one florin(a gold coin worth about $200 in today’s dollars) per five pages, so a book like the one you’re reading now would cost around $20,000. It would also come with a litany of transcription errors, since it would be a copy of a copy of a copy, the mistakes having multiplied and mutated through each generation.”

“ This made the accumulation of knowledge extremely difficult. It required heroic effort to prevent the volume of recorded knowledge from actually decreasing, since the books might decay faster than they could be reproduced. Various editions of the Bible survived, along with a small number of canonical texts, like from Plato and Aristotle. But an untold amount of wisdom was lost to the ages, and there was little incentive to record more of it to the page.”

“The pursuit of knowledge seemed inherently futile, if not altogether vain. If today we feel a sense of impermanence
because things are changing so rapidly, impermanence was a far more literal concern for the generations before us. There was “nothing new under the sun, ” as the beautiful Bible verses in Ecclesiastes put it—not so much because everything had been discovered but because everything would be forgotten.”
(The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction, by Nate Silver, September 27, 2012)

這幾段文字實在深得我心。現在許多人常嫌書貴，然而較之昔日書取得之困難，成本之高，實無法相提並論。在科技進步到電子書供應方便的時代，現代的我們好幸 福呀。在古騰堡印刷術尚未發明之前，書本早已存在，只是寫書與讀書的人都不多。當時書籍乃是貴族階層的奢侈品，由抄寫員一次生產ㄧ本，生產手抄本的一般費 用大約是每五頁要價一佛羅林金幣(約200美元），所以像這本500頁的書，手抄本要花20,000美金，而在amazon.com 買這本電子書只需花20美元，且可立即下載。今昔讀書條件差異之大無法言喻。所以1440年古騰堡印刷術發明之後，書籍數量呈現指數式的增加，幾乎一夜之 間，生產一本書的成本就下降了300倍。這當然造成人類知識存量的爆增。古人所感到的無常(impermanence) 定遠大於今人，聖經傳道書(Ecclesiastes)中說“太陽底下並無新事”(“nothing new under the sun. ”) 指的並不是所有的事情均已被發現，而是指一切都會被人遺忘。Nate Silver 所寫的這本書“The Signal and the Noise: The Art and Science of Prediction” 譯本已由三采文化出版，譯者是蘇子堯，書名為“精準預測”。
http://www.books.com.tw/products/0010598105