Denis G. Pelli and Charles Bigelow in Seed:
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for six centuries. By 2000, there were 1 million book authors per year. One million authors is a lot, but they are only a tiny fraction, 0.01 percent, of the nearly 7 billion people on Earth. Since 1400, book authorship has grown nearly tenfold in each century. Currently, authorship, including books and new media, is growing nearly tenfold each year. That’s 100 times faster. Authors, once a select minority, will soon be a majority.
But does increasing authorship matter? And is this increase a blip or a signpost? Authorship has risen steeply before. The period of the first steep rise, near 1500, coincides with the discovery of the New World and Protestantism, which saw the publication of the first vernacular Bible, translated by Martin Luther. The second, near 1800, includes the Industrial Revolution and its backlash, Romanticism. The current rise is much steeper.
More here.