Digital Publishing and the Future

"Print and its systems dominated for so long they came to seem not just the marvelous flowering of a technological achievement but practically a teleological inevitability. But just as moveable type would make obsolete the medieval scriptoria where monastic scribes labored for weeks upon single books, so too Gutenberg's invention is now giving way to the creative destruction of an arguably more powerful technology. And ultimately it won't matter much whether any of us prefers print to pixels; just as it didn't matter whether early renaissance readers preferred illuminated manuscripts to mass-printed books." -NANCY LEVINSON, Print and Pixel

Gutenberg invented the printing press to make it easier and much quicker to print books and posters. Before the printing press the typographic elements would have to be hand carved out of a block of wood in order to create the design of the page. This advancement made is so much easier to reproduce and send out information to the world. The internet and e-books of today are an even better solution to the process of sending out information. Up until books were made for the internet, it was much more costly and time consuming to make book. Before digital publishing it would take several steps and time consuming processes to create a finished printed piece. It would also involve sending your idea out to a publishing company, paying them to print out how ever many copies, and then waiting for them to arrive. Now everything is in one place and is very easy to create and upload to the internet without waiting and spending a lot. Many people still prefer physical books over e-books and other online publishing, but I agree that digital publishing will become the dominant way of publishing in the future. It just makes sense for society to turn to the digital because it saves money, time, and lots and lots of paper.

Memory of the Past (Illuminations)

"To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." ( Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, pg 255, VI ). What I got from this is that society's "memory" of  history could not possibly depict how the past really was because we were not there to experience it. We can only learn of the past through records and physical objects that have not been destroyed. Although we do not know exactly how people in the past lived their daily lives, we do know a lot of what man has accomplished through the remnants of beautifully constructed architecture, advancement in technologies, and the amazing works of art that have lasted hundreds and even thousands of years. When Benjamin relates history to a memory that flashes up at the moment of danger, he might mean that we only remember something in past as it was when it disappeared or changed. This "change" would be the progress of society, and would therefore leave the old version in the past. This view on how we remember and grow from the past could easily relate to my book about transportation and how society has learned from the past to create an even greater version for the future.

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.

Updated my book cover!

http://www.lulu.com/shop/alexandra-shock/transportation-of-tomorrow/paperback/product-21453937.html

Print is Dying?

With the internet becoming the dominant form of media, print is rapidly becoming less popular. Although many people adapted quickly to using the internet for everything, many of us still cling to old forms of printed media. As soon as something new is invented it usually replaces an older and less effective or out of date version. These older versions can then become more popular because of people becoming nostalgic for the past. I believe that this is one of the reasons why books are still around. In retrospect reading books from the internet is in my opinion easier, faster, and saves a lot of trees. Instead of storing all the books you have collected on say a bookshelf, you can store hundreds of books on your computer without taking up a ton of space. Even though reading books on the computer is more practical, books are still around because of the experience or memory that a person has with books, and now that books are more rare they have become even more precious to the owner.

POD Transforming Publishing

There are many benefits that Print-On-Demand has brought to the publishing world. POD makes it possible for anyone to publish a book for very little money. Now that we have the technologies to create a book that is cheap, easy, and quick to reproduce we can save money not only for the author but for the reader as well. Now that it is super easy to make a book, there is no need to find a company to publish your book. You become your own publisher. Society's recent technological advancements help lead to the creation of the Espresso Book Machine. Instead of uses old printing presses that would take forever to create one book, we now can make a book in minutes with the Espresso Book Machine.
"The machine can process a 300-page book (including cover and glue binding) in a few minutes,
which seems to support the American manufacturer’s definition of its product as an “ATM for books”."-pg 72.


Now people can create a book about anything they want. Philip M. Parker decided to use this cheap form of printing a book by compiling a bunch of information he gathered from the internet into organized books. He ended up publishing 200,000 books that were then sold on Amazon. Since POD is so easy and cheap, it is much easier to edit and update your book whenever you want. POD has aloud for anyone to create a book were their creative will not be stifled and it won't break the bank.

Post-Digital Print / Villemard

In the past as well as the present it seems as though with every new technological advancement related to the media is thought to be the new form of communication that would get rid of print. In chapter one of the book entitled, “Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing since 1894,”  Alessandro  Ludovico discusses the French artist Villemard. In 1910, Villemard made a series of postcards that showed his vision of the future. Some of these were depictions of people using audio instead of print. He envisioned a world where the audio had taken over all print medium. Instead of reading a book in school, children would wear strange helmet-like headphones that would play a recording of the book. The same idea would be used at home by listening to the newspaper that was recorded that morning. Although today it is true that we do use many audio based media in today’s world, print is still very relevant.

After the many years of trying to replace printed forms of communication it still exists. Even though the technology has advanced tremendously in the past 100 years, we are still holding on to print. No matter how hard designers try to replicate a paper made book onto the computer screen, there is nothing compared to holding the physical book in your hands. In the future, no matter how advanced our society becomes I believe that we will still hold a place for books in the media and also our hearts.