Ascendance of a Bookworm

This begs the obvious question: Where did the conciousness of the original Maïn go?

 

In that hindsight, it becomes obvious what's happening in page 8, but it still begs that question, and whether or not our MC ends up with MPD or this question gets largely ignored...

Apparently did not survive the fever. At the same time, the fever awakened her "former" conciousness right as the current one was about to die.

Translator here. I'm really happy to be working on this series. I'm a huge fan of the novels and the manga is just such a perfect adaptation with the adorable art.

My habit is to want to talk about series I like and answer all the questions folks have but I don't want to spoil the fun for anyone so I'm just going to say keep on reading! This story just gets better and better as it goes along.

Edit: Though I will point out an Easter Egg: on page 6 of Chapter 1, Urano is shown as a shadow reading a novel. If you look up the Honzuki no Gekokujou novels you'll see that the novel she's reading is Honzuki no Gekokujou 1. The art on the book cover is grayed out but you can definitely tell.

I find this odd - unlike other reincarnation stories that I'm reading - this MC is replacing a prior character (instead of others, where they are an entirely new character within themselves).  This begs the obvious question: Where did the conciousness of the original Maïn go?  

In that hindsight, it becomes obvious what's happening in page 8, but it still begs that question, and whether or not our MC ends up with MPD or this question gets largely ignored...

This is a work of fiction .. she will just churn out paper somewhere magically...

In purest qaulity to an affordable price...

xD
 

If that was a real scenario, should would be death before even makeing the first gold coin ...

You'd be surprised. All you need is a limited number of literate people to oversee the work, who are employed as scribes or clerks (that is, professional literate people). That's how most pre-Renaissance societies worked. Building a wall to a given height, along a line drawn on the ground, with a couple of windows more or less where marked, is something you can do without knowing how to read, for example, and one person who can read (and do math) can draw a lot of lines on the ground in a single day.

 

On the other hand, though, there's no particular need to "invent" moveable type. The famous Library of Alexandria was all hand-copied, although it was based on scroll books rather than codex books ("codex", plural "codices", is the technical term for a book made of pages bound together).

 

(Although to be fair, one of the rulers who was famously associated with it, one of the Ptolemys, cheated terribly -- he would borrow things from people who were rich enough to own them, have a copy made, and then send back the copy. Made a lot of rich people very angry, but it meant the library had all the original copies when that might be very important -- copying errors exist in old manuscripts in great abundance.)

To be honest I was thinking that something akin to the library of Alexandria would be far more realistic of a goal for her... though I doubt it would be anything near the scale

While I agree the obstacles are quite huge, I don't think they are entirely insurmountable in a faster manner than you've predicted. For one thing we know nothing of this world other than the map of the town on page 4. From that we can surmise that the town is clearly the result of urban planning. That is the sort of task that, to be executed as shown would require the cooperation of large numbers of workers, all of whom would need a solid understanding of the desired outcome. I do not believe that verbal communication alone would be enough to get this done, and while one could try it would surely be a disastrous rendition of whisper down the lane.

You'd be surprised. All you need is a limited number of literate people to oversee the work, who are employed as scribes or clerks (that is, professional literate people). That's how most pre-Renaissance societies worked. Building a wall to a given height, along a line drawn on the ground, with a couple of windows more or less where marked, is something you can do without knowing how to read, for example, and one person who can read (and do math) can draw a lot of lines on the ground in a single day.

On the other hand, though, there's no particular need to "invent" moveable type. The famous Library of Alexandria was all hand-copied, although it was based on scroll books rather than codex books ("codex", plural "codices", is the technical term for a book made of pages bound together).

(Although to be fair, one of the rulers who was famously associated with it, one of the Ptolemys, cheated terribly -- he would borrow things from people who were rich enough to own them, have a copy made, and then send back the copy. Made a lot of rich people very angry, but it meant the library had all the original copies when that might be very important -- copying errors exist in old manuscripts in great abundance.)

To sum up: in order to build a library by way of a printing press, she's not only going to have to overcome poverty (or find a rich patron who's willing to sink huge sums of money into an invention without proof in advance that it can work) but also basically instigate certain aspects of the Industrial Revolution, many of which rely on other, unrelated industries which don't contribute directly to printing but are essential to making it possible. If the tasks are presented in a reasonably believable way in the manga, and she's very lucky, and a very large number of people cooperate with her plans instead of refusing to follow the orders of someone who has a pie-in-the-sky vision of an invention which does not in fact exist, then by the time she's 70 or so she might actually succeed in having a viable small printing industry started in a couple of larger population centers, and maybe have a few hundred printed books.

While I agree the obstacles are quite huge, I don't think they are entirely insurmountable in a faster manner than you've predicted. For one thing we know nothing of this world other than the map of the town on page 4. From that we can surmise that the town is clearly the result of urban planning. That is the sort of task that, to be executed as shown would require the cooperation of large numbers of workers, all of whom would need a solid understanding of the desired outcome. I do not believe that verbal communication alone would be enough to get this done, and while one could try it would surely be a disastrous rendition of whisper down the lane.

Beyond the map, from her discovery of the purple veggie, it can be implied that her new self exists within a biosphere highly divergent from our own, meaning that all the preconceived notions you posited about source materials and difficulties processing them therein are largely null and void. I'll admit it could be a bit of a Mcguffin on the part of the author, but valid in the setting none the less.

As far as financing and implementation, I don't think it would be all that hard for her to be held in extremely high esteem by nobility no later than her teenage years. To do so would be a matter of finding a non-existing technology requiring little to no economic investment. For example, through trial and error it wouldn't be impossible for her to go off into the woods and sample a number of ingredients for remedies of local herbalists, and then isolate a culture of antibiotics. If not that she could find a local stimulant and invent coffee, invent the abacus, compass... maybe something even as simple as a spring, or a new method of irrigation. Success would be highly conditional on any number of factors, but given the dedication of most of her childhood she could get a fair amount of recognition. From that point she could move on to intermediary technologies, those which require outside investment but which are able to be constructed individually by craftsmen and be of immediate usefulness. A rudimentary, low pressure steam engine comes to mind, or perhaps inventing a spring to be utilized in the carriage of a noble in order to soften the ride. The latter would get her no small amount of recognition and make her in great demand to reproduce this for others.

In relation to the church, I agree that is a challenge. More than that though, the merchant guild mentioned in the map would be even worse. For this, too, I have no idea how  one would subvert their influence other than already being under the patronage of nobility when their ire is inevitably drawn.

All madness aside from over analyzing a work of fiction,  I'm loving this new series. My thanks to Easy Going Scans for translating it!

Sigh... how many chapters before she 'invents' the printing press?

Dunno, but that's only one step along the way to building "a library" as a modern person would recognize it. When Gutenberg spread moveable type to Europe (it was already a thing in China!) books got cheaper, but they were still very much a luxury item until the 1800s. John Harvard died in 1638, and his library was considered to be such a big one that they named Harvard University after him — and it was only 320 books. If they were good-sized modern paperbacks instead of old-fashioned hardcovers with thick bindings, you could buy 3 full-sized "Billy" bookcases from Ikea and store the whole collection with room to spare.

To build a working old-fashioned Gutenberg press from scratch, in a pre-industrial civilization, would require a huge amount of money. You not only need the press itself, which would take a lot of building but might already exist (there were printing presses for non-moveable type for a long time — the printer had to carve a whole page into a woodblock at a time), but also a set of moveable type (expensive, because it pretty much has to be metal and the individual blocks must be more or less uniform in height) and compositing tools -- and you would have to learn to composit pages (or train someone else to do so) which is a very time-consuming task which also requires the compositor to be not only literate, which appears to be rare in this manga, but able to read backwards.

At the same time, most people in pre-literate societies tend to have some very odd beliefs about machinery and science; it would not be surprising for the invention to be suppressed by religion (the Catholic Church famously hated the fact that the printing press let just anybody get hold of the bible and check whether the priests were telling the truth when they made claims about what was in it), or by the nobility, or just by a mob of stupid people who think that any machine must be a demon in disguise.

(And also: if there's going to be a printing industry, it requires a reasonably large chunk of the population who are literate and have money to spend, in order to make the products viable. It looks like neither of those conditions is very likely to exist in this fantasy world.)

And then there's the paper. There are 4 main materials for paper (vellum, which is used for scrolls and fancy documents, is actually animal skin, and it's far too costly and labor-intensive to make to be be used for printing):

• Reeds of the right type (papyrus) grow in a few places and can make paper, but apparently not only is the climate range which supports the right kinds narrow but the process is labor-intensive. Apparently not good for mass production.
• Rags make the best-quality paper but are super-expensive in pre-Industrial-Revolution times (because they have to come from hand-woven cloth, which is precious). If she's going to start the broader Industrial Revolution just to make rags — which is a possibility, after all the Industrial Revolution began with a long series of inventions related to cloth products — it will cause massive societal upheaval and misery which will likely interfere with her activities; in our world, people were kicked off their land, children as young as 4 were put to work for up to 18-hour days, and there were repeated riots because of the ways machinery changed society to harm people's lifestyles.
• Hemp can make paper and grows really quickly and in a wide array of climates, but can't be made into paper in quantity without heavy machinery which probably doesn't exist in that world (in our world, the decorticator, which is the key machine involved, wasn't invented until 1890, and was only invented because there was already a market for the processed product) -- and hemp itself may not exist over there, either.
• Wood makes terrible paper and requires modern-ish knowledge of chemistry (certainly post-Renaissance, possibly more than that) because you have to break down the wood fibers enough to make them short, so the paper is flexible, but not enough to make them fall apart. (And the process tends to leave the paper acidic, so that it gradually falls apart; fun fact: most books printed in 1970 are almost uniformly in worse condition than books printed in 1810, because wood-based paper took over so thoroughly by 1900 and was nearly all acidic until around 1980.) She could probably fudge up a batch of the necessary chemicals, if she has a really good knowledge of chemistry, but to make the right chemicals in quantity, at a level of quality which would make mass-production possible, would require once again the Industrial Revolution to happen first.

Without a reliable source of reasonably uniform paper in large sheets, the printing press isn't very useful.

To sum up: in order to build a library by way of a printing press, she's not only going to have to overcome poverty (or find a rich patron who's willing to sink huge sums of money into an invention without proof in advance that it can work) but also basically instigate certain aspects of the Industrial Revolution, many of which rely on other, unrelated industries which don't contribute directly to printing but are essential to making it possible. If the tasks are presented in a reasonably believable way in the manga, and she's very lucky, and a very large number of people cooperate with her plans instead of refusing to follow the orders of someone who has a pie-in-the-sky vision of an invention which does not in fact exist, then by the time she's 70 or so she might actually succeed in having a viable small printing industry started in a couple of larger population centers, and maybe have a few hundred printed books.

Sorry for creating a duplicate series. I couldn't find it on the search as "Honzuki no Gekokujou" wasn't included as an alternate name. We're picking up this project.

Well, as long as you did your due diligence~

Besides, we're just super happy that we get to read the manga in English

She sure loves her books. My first reaction would have been to panic over the obvious absence of a toilet.

Wait till she gets out .. and see's her new bath.

*public well*

xD

Sorry for creating a duplicate series. I couldn't find it on the search as "Honzuki no Gekokujou" wasn't included as an alternate name. We're picking up this project.

I love the web novel, it's more focus on qualty of life then other Isekai storys.

Coz fever?

More likely there's no reason for her to realize her situation at that point.  All she knows is that she woke up in terrible living conditions.  It isn't until she explores her home that she realizes the place she is reincarnated is way less advanced than her modern society.

I see cute loli, I follow.

Coz fever?

I doubt it -the way she moves around and lifts heavy stuff.

cute outside - crazy unstable and rude inside...

lets see how this goes on

 

PS: MC's book obsession level is high enough to put Konjiki no Wordmaster mc to shame.

That's because Konjiki no Wordmaster mc is also a gourmet bastard.

why doesn't she noticed that she is in a "normal" household at that time - as if they could buy some books. Or have any form of education in that matter.

Coz fever?

tbh I had a hard time reading the Novel but this is quite enjoyable.

At least she is more convincing than most other reincarnation/summoned novel mc when it comes to the reason why she has that much knowledge of the technologies or skills that she introduces. many mc are able to reproduce stuffs easily even though in their original world their job or hobby doesnt relate much to what they are making (magic is still a convenient cheat as excuse to simplify stuffs tho).

PS: MC's book obsession level is high enough to put Konjiki no Wordmaster mc to shame.

"No matter how much she wanted to read, there were no books around. What is a bookworm to do without any books? Make them, of course. Her goal is to become a librarian! So that she may once again live surrounded by books, she must start by making them herself."

 

Sigh... how many chapters before she 'invents' the printing press?

Seems like the right way to go if she wants to read books so badly and is so depressed over a world with a low literacy rate. Is she is so well read in history then why doesn't she noticed that she is in a "normal" household at that time - as if they could buy some books. Or have any form of education in that matter.

Eh, this main character is somehow strange.  I mean, read that first chapter again but replacing 「books」 with 「Net games」 or 「chocolate」 or 「Facebook」.  She's clearly got an unhealthy obssession with books, there, and we're supposed to empathize with her.

 

I mean, I'm an avid reader, too (not just of manga and light novels), and I think this is excessive.

Try replacing 「books」 with 「internet」, that'll make more sense. I'd be pretty fidgety not being able to connect online for a day...

"No matter how much she wanted to read, there were no books around. What is a bookworm to do without any books? Make them, of course. Her goal is to become a librarian! So that she may once again live surrounded by books, she must start by making them herself."

Sigh... how many chapters before she 'invents' the printing press?