Book Readings

On page 250 Manguel remarks that "reading publicly was...the best way to aquire an audience" and goes on to talk about how reading publicly helped both the author and the book-publishing house, because it garnered the people's attention and caused them to want to buy the published version. This very much reminded me of public book-signings, where authors will often read a passage of their book and fans can come and get their copies signed. I thought it was interesting to note how the order is now backwards though. Where once an author became famous because he went out and read his book out loud, nowadays authors do book signings because they already are famous. He also later goes on to say that these readings were also a sort of "proofreading" step for the authors, who would often go back and amend their works depending on how the reading went and the reactions of the audience. This would be almost unheard of in modern times, I think, because normally books, once they are published in their final form, do not typically get edited and changed by the author. The exceptions I can think to this are textbooks, which change sometimes as often as annually, or in instances where publishing houses find typos in books.