Mark Williamson wrote:
- Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live
in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far, far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.
Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make. People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they would have no way to reach their intended audience!
Most of us in developed counties would take the costs of producing a small pamphlet for granted. We might consider that spending $20.00 to produce 500 copies of a pamphlet on matters of local concern to be a bargain. In some third world countries that's equivalent to two months of income. 500 copies is already too many to reproduce with [[hectograph]]y. There may indeed not be someone close-by with the equipment to do the job.
Ec