Can we all be authors?
At the turn of the century, there were nearly 1 million books published in the calendar year. That represents an increase by a factor of ten from 1900.
But the world of publishing has changed dramatically since 2000. If you factor in new media, the rate of authorship is now growing nearly tenfold every single year:
Viewed in terms of human history, the millions of blog posts, Tweets, and Facebook status updates published each day take on enormous consequence. At the current rate, participation among the human population will reach 100 percent by 2013.
In the past, dramatic increases in authorship led to the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution. So what should we expect, sometime four years from now, when we’re all authors?
