Porn Increases Literacy

O.K. so the title of this post is a purposefully titillating. But I read an interesting paper called Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores that compares for-profit libraries in 19th-Century England with Video Rental stores of the 80's and 90's. Here are some of the similarities:

• Erotic content was a factor in the initial popularity of both media.
  
• The rental model was a new economic model that allowed both books and videos to be available to a wider audience because it was more affordable than owning.
• Both industries experienced backlash from producers (booksellers and movie studios) that thought the rental market would hurt the overall market, but it turns out to have helped provide more demand in both cases.

The authors also posit that circulating libraries helped to increase literacy during the 19th century by bringing more books to the masses. (And since erotic content helped fuel the interest in circulating libraries, you have the title of the blog post.)


Circulating Libraries and Video Rental Stores by Richard Roehl and Hal R. Varian
First Monday, volume 6, number 5 (May 2001),
URL: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_5/roehl/index.html