Vulnerability of Literature.

If you ever read Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers you will see just how many works were lost through history.  There were many reasons, one of course is the material the works were written on. Durability factor. Look at how the hierogylphics survived. Also lack of of curators. When they did survive thousands of years they were destroyed in war. Not surprising that some works survived because they were passed on by word of mouth. Many of the classic works survived due to their memorability and development of mnemonics. There are many feats of memory seen through history, one is that of Simonides helped indentify the victims from recalling who was there. This reminds me of Frances Yates marvelous book on The Art of Memory while looked at different memory systems of the Renaissance. In the modern age we see several examples of attempts to memorise "secrets" or literature considered subversive.  Such as the hapless memory man in Hitchcock's 39 Steps, the characters in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, but from my perspective it is the real feat of Nadezhda Mandelstam which is so remarkable, she memorised her husband's poems and their lives, all of which was published in her biographies, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned. A work of love and resistance against Stalin.  I used to read the Penguin selected Osip Mandelstam on the Tokyo subway and thinking of the sacrifices both made. 

We no longer have a memory or oral culture, we are increasingly becoming more dependent on the internet and IT/AI to memorize for us.  Most of our backup systems are reliant on technology. Books from the 16th century have survived in a fairly large number. One can hide them.  One owns them. I mean one has real property rights, not so on the internet. People can freely steal my book. The servers have copies. If I write a blog everything can be lost just like that -- due to a virus, or often or not because the owners of the site have been taken over. Recently, they wanted to update the site on which I have my blog. In the transfer of data from one system to another, it is conceivable a million times  was lost than  in the fire that destroyed the Alexandrian Library. Corporations rather than dictators or emperors, are our "benign" curators.