The term author is a new one. It is referencing to an individual who is publishing a book. The interesting fact is, that in today's academic publishing industry no authors are available, but papers are created by institutions. The so called affiliation is the most important sign to be a member of a larger institution. That means, a new paper about a computer science topic isn't created by one or two individuals but it's initiated by university department in cooperation with a journal. This is especially true for the hard science.
In the domain of human science, the situation is more relaxed. That means, in the human science individual authors are creating papers, and they doing so without asking the university first. The reason is, that in ficitional writing there is a long tradition of become an author and self-publish the work either in print format or in the internet.
Let us take a look into some recent developments in academic publishing. The upraising of academic social networks like Researchgate and Academia.edu can be called a small revolution because they put the attention on the individual author. A paper is no longer the result of group working at an institution, but it's created by individual for their own purpose. The argument against such development is very similar to authorship in general. That means, the idea that a book is created by somebody, and it's not for somebody is something which is new.
To understand the situation in detail we have to ask for the relationship between reader and author. In today's academic publishing system, the reader is the center of attention. If somebody likes to learn something about science he can visit a library, a university or a book shop. In all these cases, the reader gets a lot of help. The average library provides thousands of books, and in a university the user can decide between many hundred of lectures. Now we have to focus on the other social role. Suppose, the idea is, that somebody likes to write and publish a book. Which options are available? The amount is small, or to be more specific, there is no way, that somebody is allowed to publish anything, especially not if the topic is within science or technology. The reason is, that publishing in the ivory tower works not by individuals, but with larger groups for example it's driven by a company, or by a journal.
It's not very hard to predict, that in the future the situation will flip. The individual author will become the top priority and the reader gets ignored. This has to do with the increasing amount of authors. That means, if all the people are authors, all the people likes to publishing something on an individual basis. The boom of the self-publishing market is only the first step in that direction. Self-publishing in the new, means usually to publish ficitional books, but not knowledge about science and technology. The reason is, that in the fiction segment it's very common that the authors stays in the focus who.
The open question is, how authorship will become dominant in the non-fiction segment. One way in doing so is to define rules under which publication of non-fiction / scientific books make sense and under which situation not. A possible rule is, that only the publication of detailed specialized knowledge make sense. A non-fiction writer is asked to write a book which fits into a department library of a university, but not into a universal library. The idea is, that a document about the dewey classification 500 is useless, because 500 isn't specific enough. It's reserved for general information about natural science and mathematics. The better idea is to write a book about DDC 519.233 which is about markov processes as a subsection of probability theory. The value of non-fiction information depends on how deep in the DDC22 tree the book is located.
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