last straw
The United States papermaking industry may be the last to decline to Chinese imports. The
NewPage mill in Luke MD represents a remnant industrial economy.
pdf galley gab
Here is a hybrid, a pdf
news sheet exemplifying conventions of both paper and screen to mutual advantage. Its loaded with fascinating discussion to dwell on.
non-news
“The dusty world of book publishing has taken a
step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.
Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.”
From the perspective here this
development is akin to the advent of publishers’ catalogs; of interest to readers and book retailers, but not changing the landscape of paper and screen transmission or subtracting from the functionality of print.
slow dancing
“The digital talent for short-term solutions was understood as itself a profound long-term problem.” Stewart Brand, 1998
Time and Bits
A discordance between cultural transformations paced in centuries and a churn of cutural transmission technologies with a backward compatibility of months produces the uncertain functionality of the screen based book. The book was invented, to begin with, to match the pace of cultural transformations. Once achieved it became an engine of those transformations and many new futures were engendered. I suspect the print book will surprise us again generations from now.
ancientmoderntimeless
The elegant
sewn boards binding structure is now 20 or 1200 years old, depending on how you count time. Based on the Coptic double cover of the 8th century and reinvented on-stage at an
LBS conference in 1987, this timeless structure prefigures the future of the book.