Wednesday, February 19, 2014

I Have to Reprint Everything?? ( Post-Artifact Books and Publishing )

"To truly understand how strange and special they are, it helps to have experience with their analog cousins. Have you ever made a physical book before? What I mean is, have you ever edited and sent the files to a printer to be reproduced several thousand times? It’s terrifying. There is a pervasive hopelessness to the entire process. You know there must be mistakes. Check page numbers and punctuation a hundred times still, and by the sheer magnitude of molecules composing a book, you will miss something." - Craig Mod. 
I think Craig Mod makes an interesting point here about how once the book is printed then it will be forever unchanged. This makes it really scary for someone who makes hundreds, even thousands of copies and then realizes that they made a spelling error or to find out that they all printed incorrectly. Too late! Now you either have to live with the mistakes and hope no one else will notice or reprint everything and lose a ton of money. Also the larger the book is, the more likely there are mistakes in it that you have missed. I myself have made a huge mistake in the passed when printing out a book that I made for class. I spent $25 to print just one copy in color and when I finally received it I realized that I printed it on the wrong size paper. This was an easy mistake to fix and also to mess up. After that I became incredibly careful not to mess the next one up. Books made for the web do not have this problem. The are first of all much cheaper to create than physical books and if you notice a mistake you can just go bak in and edit it without loosing a ton of money or have to purchase everything all over again.

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