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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

If this is indeed true then there is an ironic aspect to it. The continued non-existence of a German state until 1871 – here presented as the reason for the lack of effectiveness of copyright law in the German states – is one of the canonical reasons why the German states were lagging behind in their economic development. (It’s hard to be all that successful when your company has to ship its product through half a dozen states [+] – all with customs and different laws – just to get it from Cologne to Munich.)

It’s certainly nice to see attempts at explaining why Germany caught up with and to some extent even overtook England. I don’t think that the canonical explanations (which to me always seem to include a lot of handwaving) are very convincing.

[+] Map: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Deu...

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It also doesn't cover correlation/causation. Did the book boom cause their industrialization, or did the mass industrialization cause the book boom?

Whether they're correlated at all is a valid question, but I don't think you can argue that mass industrialization of Germany caused the book boom, considering that the book boom started over a century before mass industrialization began in earnest.

It seems far more plausible that there was an exogenous factor causing the book boom in Germany: the number of Germans that actually knew how to read

The article hints at this when it suggests a German earned more in royalties (without effective copyright) for a treatise on leather tanning at the beginning of the century than Mary Shelley did for Frankenstein. Either UK publishers were exceptionally bad at maximising revenue (or sharing it with authors), or there was a much greater demand for books in Germany which had little to do with the supply of cheap copies

A highly plausible explanation is that German appetite for reading was driven by compulsory state-sponsored primary education, contrasting with the part-time, parochial education available in the UK at the time.

Despite low literacy rates the UK did a pretty impressive job of industrialising in the 20th century; to argue otherwise is to ignore the rate of absolute progress in favour of dubious relative metrics in the manner of Wired's recent "web is dead".

Oh, the UK’s industry was and still is impressive. But the German states were far, far, far behind in the 19th century. It’s just surprising that they could catch up at all.

It's not really that suprising. Industrialization originated in the UK, and emerged gradually from the economic and cultural situation there without any intentional design. When the Germans began industrializing, the UK's industry was mature and well-developed, which provided a very detailed practical example to reference.

19th-century Germany and Japan and modern China have all had the ability to work directly toward a goal, rather than having to wait for industrialization to emerge naturally from within their own economies (although if they had, it would probably have produced a set of customs and practices much more suited to their own cultures and economic conditions).

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