strange and obvious
At the turn of the 20th century the manufacturers and operators of composition and type casting machines were the IT geeks of their era. Keyboard prompting, programmed automation and electronic displacement of manual composition changed text transmission. Now this “revolution”, as assimilated into letterpress history, is almost invisible.
Today instruction in mechanical composition and type casting is needed, not as a specialty of letterpress transmission, but as an instructional exemplar for the current “revolution” of text transmission. Enclaves of print and screen transmission need the connectivity of their tangents.
(more)
for a while to come
“The ebook market is in a transitional phase today. The majority of people still read print and will continue to do so for a while to come. However there are a growing number of early adopters who are reading ebooks. Most continue to read a mix of both print and digital formats. The main advantage of ebooks at the moment is distribution – both in terms of speed and cost. However the reading experience is still poor compared to print, unless you have an e-reader with a new e-ink display.”
Mark Gladding
The twilight of the book includes a curious glow. It appears that many of the extinctions are occuring in the emerging species without otherwise disturbing evolution. Will the paper book have a different niche in the new ecology that the screen book will provoke?
commemoration
This site has been posting now for ten years.
carbon footprint
“I donít buy the argument that the best way to save the planet is to eliminate print publicationsóor books, for that matter. Paper, when made right, is a renewable, recyclable, biodegradable resource, unlike the must-be-replaced-every-three-years computers, hand-helds, and other petroleum-based products we put our trust in.” Leonard Kniffel
There is energy cost to screen display including the server farms and it is cost compounded rather than diminished over time.