Fascinating, and I'm still thinking about how today's self-publishing craze might accomplish something similar. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/publishers-gave-away-122951031-books-during-world-war-ii/379893/
I remember an episode of M.A.S.H. where they touch upon this. Just as in the article, the book has been divided into sections and Hawkeye Pierce spends the episode trying to get his hands on each subsequent section. Different war, though.
The quotes you provided reminded me of this: The Player Piano “I foresee a marked deterioration in American Music…and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various music reproducing machines” -- John Philips Sousa, 1906 The Video Cassette Recorder "But now we are faced with a new and troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life, and we are facing it from a thing called the Video Cassette Recorder" -- MPAA President Jack Valenti in 1982 Cassette Tapes "When the manufacturers hand the public a license to record at home...not only will the songwriter tie a noose around his neck, not only will there be no more records to tape, but the innocent public will be made accessory to the destruction of four industries" -- ASCAP, 1982 The Mp3 Player “Diamond's product Rio was destined to undermine the creation of a legitimate digital distribution marketplace..." -- RIAA President Hillary Rosen in 1998 The Digital Video Recorder "It's theft...Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming." Turner Broadcasting CEO Jaime Kellner in 2002 I wonder if self-published free ebooks have/will have/can have a similar effect increasing readership among people who don't read for pleasure but have the requisite screens to do so.
So... when I get up to go pee during the commercial break, I'm stealing, Mr. Kellner? Guess I won't go check to see if there's any pound cake left in the fridge either. Sheesh.
The only thing I would say is that the self-pub model doesn't benefit from the "captive audience" dynamic that the Armed Services Edition distribution program did. They knew their audience was captive and made use of that dynamic to push books that the soldiers themselves probably would not have chosen. That seems to be the core of the article's message: We artfully (artificially) gentrified soldiers by offering them mostly hoity-toity titles instead of low-brow genre fic. I get it, and I'm glad it was a thing what they did, but I get so chafed by the never ending dump on genre fic. It's evident even in this article.
Imagine that you write a book, it does not sell very well at home, a few people see the quality of it, they print thousands of copies, they ship them to soldiers, the soldiers have nothing to do for long stretches of time, they pick up your book out of boredom, they read it, they fall in love with it, it boosts their morale, they come home after winning the war, they talk about how much they love your book, the general population gives it another chance, they fall in love, your book becomes a classic, and it is immortalized as great literature.
Or imagine that you write a book which doesn't sell at all, so you put it on Amazon as a free download, and you do a little free promotional stuff, and some fairly influential blogger notices it and pumps it up and his comments go viral, and folks all over the country stop playing Angry Birds long enough to download and read and love your story and start clamoring for more in the Amazon Reviews section, allowing you to write books for which you can charge actual money, eventually reaching #1 in Fiction on Amazon, and ensuring your place in recent literary history, not to mention financial solvency, all the while luring non-readers into the readers fold.
What a genius idea, really wonderful turn of events for us all, I think Also, what a way to humanise those soldiers. War is such a horrific and nasty thing.
