a quality-assurance operation that had stood Europe in good stead
for centuries.

In the late nineties, I went to conferences where music execs
patiently explained that Napster was doomed, because you didn't
get any cover-art or liner-notes with it, you couldn't know if
the rip was any good, and sometimes the connection would drop
mid-download. I'm sure that many Cardinals espoused the points
raised above with equal certainty.

What the record execs and the cardinals missed was all the ways
that Luther Bibles kicked ass:

[CHART: WHY LUTHER BIBLES KICKED ASS]

* They were cheap and fast. Loads of people could acquire them
without having to subject themselves to the authority and
approval of the Church

* They were in languages that non-priests could read. You no
longer had to take the Church's word for it when its priests
explained what God really meant

* They birthed a printing-press ecosystem in which lots of books
flourished. New kinds of fiction, poetry, politics, scholarship
and so on were all enabled by the printing presses whose initial
popularity was spurred by Luther's ideas about religion.

Note that all of these virtues are orthagonal to the virtues of a
monkish Bible. That is, none of the things that made the