Weekly Weird: Printing Presses and Data Crystals

We had a lot of questions for this month’s Q&A, and this one answer ran a bit… long. So we are putting it up as an extra Weekly Weird!

How high is the general literacy rate? Is there a printing press - if so how long has it been around?

There has been a printing press in action in Clanna-Ca’sta since literally the first days of The Fall. There was only one, though, and the materials needed to use it became very difficult to replicate (when your entire underground city relies on a small number of greenhouses for food, growing fiber-rich crops to make high-quality paper pulp is *super* hard to justify.) They quickly figured out how to make a low-quality paper from rags and other lower quality fibers that was suitable for newspapers, but the paper degraded easily so high-quality bound books were still very valuable in the First Age. But daily newspapers thrive even in the First Age, and for millennia afterwards. After the establishment of major urban areas in the Building Age, printing presses for both books and newspapers are fairly common in high-population areas. In later centuries, books are really only rare in the Middle Lands (where printing presses are less common) and in poor, rural areas of the other nations. In all but the most rural areas, temples and chapels of Ulic and Feator function as public free-lending libraries.

Equally important to literacy on the Continent is the technology of quartz-crystal data storage and readers. While this tech was first pioneered by Prothidian Altar, the Mad Mage himself, it was quickly adopted by the Free Peoples of the Continent during the First Age. In the first millennia, only energy-empathic Talents could read the data stored on these crystals. In later millennia, technology based in the iungo plant helps unTalented folk read data crystals. This tech is initially quite expensive, limiting its use, but become *very* widespread in later centuries, and by Jathen’s time in the 8th millennium, data crystal technology is part of everyday life for most people in the Continent’s middle and upper classes. Many public-lending and academic libraries ultimately archive the vast majority of their real paper books, and the copied pages are stored and loaned out as data crystals.

The question of “how widespread is literacy” overall is answered at length in this old 2021 Language Listicle. But the short answer is that most people in most locations, from Tar’citadel to tiny rural villages, are literate in their native languages and capable of writing in their local alphabet or writing system. Conversational bilingualism among the inhabitants of the Eleven Nations is fairly common, and is most common among Tar’citadel's citizens and temporary residents. For most folk this second fluency is either in either Tar’cil or a minority language endemic to their area. (If you haven’t read it before, check out that old Language Listicle post for a lot of little details about minority languages, education, translators, popular media, and differences between literacy in the Middle Land and the rest of the Nations)

So… if you were visiting a Way Walker’s library, which kind of book would *you*  prefer?