still strong
Bud Lang’s Model #5 is the oldest working Linotype in the country. It was built in 1905 in an era when keyboard automation was still science fiction. Now it is running one hundred and three years and many industrial revolutions later. And strange to say, it can still spit out the news of the day without hesitation. From telegraph to internet, it is all letter setting and line casting for the Model #5. Both modern and antique, when you watch it in action and prompt the keyboard the performance space of change is quiet and unchanging.
taking off again
“Hoping to stir the sleepy electronic book market and steal some of the spotlight from Amazon.comís Kindle, Sony Electronics is unveiling its latest
Reader Digital Book this evening in New York.”
lightning source
30,000 to 35,000 books each day with an average run of 1.8 copies per title and same day fulfillment to Amazon shipping in the back room. Interact this with screen based review, customer profiles and access engines and the prospects for print fulfillment of Kindle orders is rather real.
What if screen based book indexing and book transactions essentially overcome constraints of print marketing and distribution?
beyond google print
Google Print has popularized previously unknown print books. Now the CIC, big ten plus University of Chicago, are visualizing their own digital repository to curate their Google books and improve long term access to their own book digitization work.
Well and good. The assured authentication of the university virtual library brings up a small point; if the digital hit of the surrogate is equivalent to a circulation of the print original why not count that in circulation statistics?
Suddenly we will have a surge in access of real libraries and a new validation of the continuing role of print in a context of screen delivery.