How to keep paper copies of a "knowledge base" up-to-date in a fantasy world?

Question

I am currently working on a fantasy world, in which one city maintains a written knowledge base about all knowledge they have about the world. This knowledge base consists of dozens of tomes, each covering a specific subject (physics, biology, history, geography...).

Some of the inhabitants of the city travel across the world, to find new pieces of knowledge for the knowledge base, and occasionally return to the city to add the knowledge they found to the knowledge base, adding new pages to certain tomes, or even new tomes. Because of that, it's updated very often (about once every 10 days).

Updates can be as great as adding five new tomes about a recently-discovered continent, and as small as changing the name of the current king of a kingdom (or correcting typos).

Many people (let's say 1,500) have copies of one or more tomes of this knowledge base, and it's likely they want to keep it up-to-date. To do so, I have found two possible solutions (although there may be others, that may include magic):

1. Somewhere in the city, there is a "reference copy" of the knowledge base. In each copy of each tome of the knowledge base, there is a spell that "updates" the tome whenever the reference tome is modified, by adding pages, changing the text, etc. (a bit like our Wikipedia). When a new tome is released however, the spell doesn't "teleport" it, and the tome needs to be bought in the city. This solution will make the tomes more expensive.

2. The books don't update by themselves, and the owner of a tome has to go to the city and ask for its tome to be updated, which can happen in various ways. The old tome will probably be exchanged for a new one, and its components (paper, ink, cover) will later be reused, maybe to print new tomes for the knowledge base. This is the cheapest solution, as it allows recycling the materials from old tomes.

However I neither know if they are the best ways to do it, nor which solution I should use.

Which way should copies of the knowledge base be keept up-to-date?

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Update

The knowledge base aims to provide a reliable source of up-to-date information about all knowledge gathered by the city. Updating a copy of one of its tomes should (ideally) not be too difficult.

The world has antiquity- and medieval-level technology, but the city that makes the knowledge base has developed more advanced technologies, such as the printing press, and has a very wide knowledge of magic.

The paper used in the books is made from a plant, and is therefore renewable; it can be recycled into new paper. The ink comes as well from plants, and can be reused once separated from the paper, which can be done with the use of magic. Paper and ink should not be an issue, although waste should be avoided.

About magic

The way magic works is quite complex. To make it simple, it is based on swapping two areas of the world that have the same shape (generally small areas, such as a glass of water and air, or a sheet of paper and air), with no limitation of distance and at the speed of light, and on creating invisible tangible surfaces (that can be used, for example, to create a protection shield, to guide an arrow, etc.). With these two basic elements, almost any effect that acts on matter can be created (such as removing a page from a book, or teleporting somebody).

It is also possible for a spell to store values (like a position, a message, etc.), and two different spells can communicate with each other.

Spells can be stored in special crystals and remain active for any amount of time, thus allowing any effect to remain active indefinitely in any tome of any copy of the knowledge base.

Answer 1

How it was done in real life

This answer explains how paper-based reference manuals were kept up to date in the olden days before electronic manuals.

So let us consider the case of the complete set of documentation for an operating system and tools. In the old days on could and did order such a complete set of documentation when acquiring a new computer installation. And it was kept up to date.

The documentation came in two- or three-ring binders, one or more binders for each subject -- the assembler, the linker, the Fortran compiler, the indirect commands processor, the standard library etc. etc. There was one master binder containing the index to the documentation, and listing the name of each binder with its subject matter. Overall, the complete set of documentation occupied a fairly large cabinet.

^{The "Grey Wall" of VAX/VMS documentation, at Living Computers: Museum + Labs in Seattle, WA. Picture by user Vt320, available on Wikimedia under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license.}

Pages in each binder were not numbered sequentially from 1 to hundreds, but rather they were numbered by chapter and appendix: 1-1, 1-2, .., 1-27, 2-1, 2-2, ..., 2-40, 3-1, 3-2, ... 3-51, ..., A-1, A-2, ..., B-1, B-2, ... and so on. When a field change order required changes to the documentation, the customers who had active subscriptions received one or more packages containing:

• For each affected binder, a new title page, listing the new version number and update date.

• For each affected binder, a set of updated or new pages.

The customer was supposed to go to the documentation cabinet, pick up each affected binder, open the rings, replace the title page and all changed pages, and insert the new pages. The old superseded pages were either discarded or inserted at the end of the binder for reference.

This process worked for many decades. I understand that there are still some fields where paper-based reference manuals are considered desirable, and as far as I know they still apply this process.

Answer 2

Itinerant scrivener.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrivener

They go door to door. Often they have a route that includes steady customers. There is some rivalry between different scrivener camps. Most are independent contractors and work for one or another outfit that keeps an updated copy of the reference work and provides supplies and work guarantees. Most are literate but poor. Some differ; one is a an educated thief who uses the work to identify targets. One claims to have memorized the entirety of the Encyclopedia.

The scriveners go out and offer to update privately held Encyclopedias. The scriveners will have on their persons copies (that they have personally made) of the latest updates. In the Encyclopedia, they might update right on the old page, sanding off or painting off old words and adding new. They have new pages, some of which they have made in advance that they will sell. Some owners just want the info. Some want their Encylopedias all done in homogenous handwriting and there are scriveners who specialize in emulating what has come before.

-- I envision an interesting story. A young scrivener is invited to visit an isolated mansion. The new heir wants the Encylopedia updated. It has been a long time; his father is dead and his grandfather the former lord was an iconoclastic recluse. The scrivener finds the Encyclopedia has not been updated for decades. It will be a lot of work. Profitable work!

As he prepares, he realizes the old Encyclopedia in this mansion has some information in it that he has never seen. Some disturbing information. He is a reader, not a question asker. He goes back to headquarters and into the archives and begins to read...

Answer 3

Use Version Control

This problem is not too dissimilar to the management of changes in Software Development, where multiple contributors are altering a collection of files and documents.

At the most basic, all you need is that central "Main" or "Reference" copy, with a version number. Any time someone makes a change to it, you increment the number. Then everyone can just look at the version number of their own copy and decide if they're willing to live with being a version or twelve behind.

But how do you know if that one change is a small typo or the inclusion of a whole new dynasty? That's where more complex Build numbers come in.

Encyclopedia Galactica V3.14.159

Software traditionally uses four numbers for their Versions, although only three are public. These are Major, Minor, Patch and Dev.

Your Major number (the 3 above) is your large, critical, breaking changes. If someone is a Major version behind then their Encyclopedia is officially out of date, and unacceptable as a reference.

Your Minor number (the 14) is for important but not totally critical changes. Still valid for those who can't justify the expense of regular updates, but not viable for serious reference.

The Patch number (the 159) is where you put all the tiny changes. Fixing typos, rearranging pages, and the like where being behind here is not going to leave you spouting objectively wrong information.

Finally, Dev numbers are kept internal, and track the changes your scholars make to a document before releasing it to the public. And this number allows us to bring in the next concept of Branches.

Conflicting Information

Depending on how fine-grained your documents are, there may be cases where multiple scholars wish to alter the same book. They can do this by branching off from Main, adding their information, and then merging the changes back in. This allows each distinct change to be vetted and reviewed individually, and then whomever wishes to merge second has the responsibility of incorporating the now Canon changes into their own branch before it can be accepted. You can even have scholars make Requests to Pull their work into their colleagues working copies.

The thing to remember is that version numbers always increment, and when you increment, you reset all the lower priority numbers to 0. Thus 3.14.159 can be updated to 3.14.160, or to 3.15.0, or to 4.0.0. But if two separate branches have conflicting changes, the final version will depend on the order they were merged. If the higher priority one goes first, then you'll end up with 4.1.1.

At this point, getting the versions out to your readers is purely a logistics problem. Those who want to spend all the money for the most up to date information will have an enchanted book that matches a Reference copy. For those who value their wallet more than the the exact spelling of King Whatsherface may only buy a new copy if the Minor version changes, and there'll be some poor backwaters who are buying copies secondhand that are two Major versions out of date because its better than nothing.

Answer 4

I offer you a solution I used for a similar problem in my fantasy world for my RPG table.

I'm basing this answer in the fact that your magic can move things around and "speak" with other magical spells. This is more than enough to get the effect I'm offering below.

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Soulscribe Pedestals

Those lectern-like pieces of furniture are made of what appears to be stone and metal braided together around a core of magical crystal, with a resting area made of wood on top.

This resting area has dedicated holding areas for an ink container, a specially enchanted quill, and a tome. A shelf with extra sheets of parchment should be set up nearby, in case new pages should be added to the tome.

Each Soulscribe Pedestal is linked to the Great Archive by a rite that makes it aware of the contents of every tome on the archives on their current state. When supplied with a tome, those magical lecterns can sync up the contents of the tome placed on them with the updated version on the archives by magically manipulating the pages and quill in such a manner to mimic the manual labor of a scribe. Supplying an empty tome with nothing but a title on the cover to a Soulscribe Pedestal would make it write out an entirely new copy of the original tome, by syncing it out with the tomes in the Great Archive.

If one isn't aware of the precise name of the book they need, they can always query the library's index by placing a tome with an empty title on top of the pedestal, signaling it to provide an updated list of every tome it has access to. Alternatively, a topic can be supplied - say, "Geography" or "Mathematics", or even something more specific like "Advanced Calculus" - causing the pedestal to write out a list of only the tomes that fit that supplied category.

Those pedestals are somewhat expensive, however - so there would be a limited number of them around on private housing, reserved for the more rich folks. Most people would visit a Soulscribe Workshop, where they would place their empty or outdated tomes in publicly-available Soulscribe Pedestals and go for a meal or a discussion with like-minded people.

Special Soulscribe Pedestals that work on reverse also exist - those can read a tome placed on them, and sync the contents of those tomes with those in the Great Archives by similar means. Those "Push-mode" Soulscribe Pedestals would be far rarer, of course - and reserved only for those with proper permission to edit what the Archives had in them. They are somewhat dangerous if misused, yes, but they also allow information to be sent to the Archives from anywhere in the world, thus creating a true network of information.

Answer 5

Big, comprehensive books or collections of books are typically not going to be the ideal format for evolving knowledge at the forefront of scholarship in any field. In the real world, new knowledge is published in journals which have periodical issues; libraries subscribe to journals, meaning they receive a copy of each issue, and retain every issue. A library may also order back-issues of a journal if it wants to expand its collection of knowledge to a subject it didn't previously subscribe to a journal about.

This means the information is organised primarily by subject (i.e. each journal covers research in a particular subject, and fields with more active research can have more journals each covering more specific subjects in that field), and secondarily by the date the research was done. Within a single issue, there will be several articles that have little or nothing to do with each other, except for being written at about the same time. That's obviously not optimal for finding the current state of knowledge on a very specific thing, but it is optimal for distributing that knowledge to the libraries; when some information needs to be updated, nobody goes through the old texts to correct them, the new information is just published in the most recent issue of the appropriate journal. People who need to keep their knowledge at the cutting edge of that field, for whatever reason, read each issue when it's published, though probably only the few articles that are of interest to themselves.

In order to make this system more useful for readers, each article has an abstract (a short description of what new knowledge that article contributes), and there are some literature review articles which summarise the current state of knowledge in a topic with references to the relevant journal articles. When the state of knowledge in a subject reaches some level of maturity, such that it's known which findings are the most important or useful, and which findings did not withstand scrutiny, that's when the big comprehensive tome about that subject gets written. The result is that textbooks are published much more rarely than journal issues, and they don't contain the most recent knowledge, but the knowledge in them is stable enough that another textbook on the same subject won't need to be published for a while.

If mistakes are discovered in a textbook after publication, they can still be distributed as errata - extra pages to be inserted into the book. But there is enough of a delay between knowledge being published in journal articles and textbooks that most mistakes can be found before the textbook is written.

Answer 6

Say, do you need the data to be written specifically on books? That space-swapping thing looks like it could be turned into a sort of internet.

You could, instead of tomes, sell "terminals" and tokens. A terminal would allow you to select a specific page from the database, and then have the token be exchanged for the page (in two separate transactions of course. The tokens are merely an anti-crime measure, not a replacement for a page). When the user is done using it, they would send the page back, and have their token returned. Of course that would require many copies of pages to exist within the archive (far less than amount of people owning the terminals total, but still quite a lot of work), and the terminals can be very expensive (a magic crystal for each can be quite a lot). But the problem of keeping up to date with the center disappears, because you are always requesting the data directly from the center.

Instead of paper pages however, other materials could be used, if they are found to be cheaper or easier to work with/copy. Unlike with books, the material being thin enough to fit is not an issue, when you work with but a few pages at a time, and it being more resilient to wear, as well as capacity to be trivially recyclable and workable may be a priority. Oh, and the people who make contributions to the base could use the terminals too for instantly and safely transfering their findings.

And, of course, if the people are smart enough, they could use encoding and spells to decode tiny particles of matter falling into slots - into human readable letters. But sending entire pages may be good enough.

Answer 7

The way magic works is quite complex. To make it simple, it is based on swapping two areas of the world that have the same shape

This looks like quantum entanglement, with a bit more magic on top of it. This makes it VERY easy to solve your problem.

When you buy a book, it comes entangled to an anti-book that is stored in the astral plane, which works as a photographic negative of the reader's own copy. Whenever something gets retconned updated in a tome, astral golems get the update from the editor and then robotically go through each and every copy of the respective anti-book in the astral library, applying the update. The books in possession of people around the world get the opposite of the change, which effectively keeps them up to date.

Answer 8

Please first read The Catalog of Shipwrecked Books That explains how pretty-much what you Ask was attempted by Christopher Columbus' son; how far he got with it, many of the problems he met along the way and how his pioneering work laid some of the foundations for modern bibliography and data-management.

(I'd have Posted a useful link, but SE doesn't tolerate that sort of thing.)