How Powerful is a Book?

I think you're approaching the question the wrong way. A book on its own is just some paper and a bit of leather. The powerful thing is the information in it. The utility of books is that they let you preserve and transport ideas. So the answer to your question "How powerful is a book?" is another question. How powerful is your idea?
 
The grape vine is as good as a book for assimulating ideas. The Norse did not read How to Pillage England by Ragnar the Ruthless to learn about going avikinging. Instead they heard that he and a boat load of berserkers went there, sacked a monastery and came back with a load of loot as did Einar One Eye and Eric One-handed. The stories don't need to be entirely true; a lot of rubbish was published about the New World and Africa. They just need to be good enough to be passed on.

Where a book has the edge is as a repository of knowledge. The Spanish colonies in Mexico have more than a passing resemblance to the ideas in Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius written in 30 BC. Moreover they can contain plans, maps and blueprints.
 
Depends, Holy Books are as powerful as the faith their believers put in them.

Secular books are only powerful when they're focusing an already popular idea or set of ideals, though said ideals don't have to already be organized and knowingly widely popular.


As to the PoD Book itself, well Pan-Germanism had enough issues itself, ranging from large groups of the general population opposing it to the ruling powers opposing it to its supporters torn and opposing each other on what form it should take, and that's in a cultural zone where everyone speaks the same language and had spent a millennium as part of a single polity of one sort or another, so yeah, Pan-Germanicism is never going to be popular since their were already established national identities and neither the populace or governing powers would be supportive of it, regardless of how charismatic a book might be written.
 
It is possible that Dantes Inferno created Italy. It certainly created Italian.

Something like Wagners Ring Cycle might push pan germanicism. Somebody did a story where Beethoven wrote and finished a different 10th symphony that did this.
 
It is possible that Dantes Inferno created Italy. It certainly created Italian.

Something like Wagners Ring Cycle might push pan germanicism. Somebody did a story where Beethoven wrote and finished a different 10th symphony that did this.

No, Dante's Inferno definitely did NOT create Italy. It did contribute significantly to the creation of Italian, but it didn't alone, and it didn't first. The language that was to be recognized as "Italian" had a significant literary tradition before Dante, and when, a couple of centuries later, there was a need to standardize the literary language, Dante was considered as a minor contributor, with Petrarca and Boccaccio as the main inspirators. Of course, Petrarca and Boccaccio's Italian would not exist without Dante, but still.
 
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