10 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
    1. the closing at the beginning of this year of the last paper mill in the U.S. that produced high-quality literary opaque paper.

      via David Cloyce Smith

    2. the number of *American* printers that can print large books has decreased by two—bankruptcies, both of them. In fact, there are only two firms remaining in the U.S. that both have the presses to print on thin (30# to 40#) paper *and* that can do sewn bindings of books of 1,200 pages or more.
  2. Sep 2022
    1. Right? You said... No, no, bullshit. Let's write it all down and we can go check it. Let's not argue about what was said. We've got this thing called writing. And once we do that, that means we can make an argument out of a much larger body of evidence than you can ever do in an oral society. It starts killing off stories, because stories don't refer back that much. And so anyway, a key book for people who are wary of McLuhan, to understand this, or one of the key books is by Elizabeth Eisenstein. It's a mighty tome. It's a two volume tome, called the "Printing Press as an Agent of Change." And this is kind of the way to think about it as a kind of catalyst. Because it happened. The printing press did not make the Renaissance happen. The Renaissance was already starting to happen, but it was a huge accelerant for what had already started happening and what Kenneth Clark called Big Thaw.

      !- for : difference between oral and written tradition - writing is an external memory, much larger than the small one humans are endowed with. Hence, it allowed for orders of magnitude more reasoning.

  3. Apr 2022
    1. A number of incunabula mention that 300 copies were printed, though this figure may have become formulaic. Most scholars assume that despite contextual variations, print runs generally increased during the sixteenth century—1,000 is often used as a ballpark estimate.181

      Print runs of the earliest books by publishers may have been around 300 copies going up to 1,000 copies during the sixteenth century. Compare this to 10,000 copies today to reach "best seller" status.

    2. Printing made books affordable to greater numbers than before, as various humanist observers noted, whether they felt this was for the better (Andrea de Bussi, Ludovico Carbone) or for the worse (e.g., Hieronymo Squarcia- fico).17

      Example that every new technology will have its proponents and its detractors.

      link to Plato/Socrates on the use of writing as a replacement for speaking and memory.

  4. Oct 2021
  5. Jun 2021
    1. The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery.

      Technology fears definitely repeat themselves. This pattern also repeated with social media, television, radio, etc.

      The key may be to worry about the thing that gets lost or changes, and come up with a way to exercise and utilize it despite the newest technology?

      How might we prevent ourselves from repeating this cyclic history with the next major change?

  6. Aug 2018
    1. Ten years ago, if I knew someone primarily through online means, you could guarantee they had their own domain name. It was just before the big explosion in social media use which meant that if you wanted a space online, you had to create it. This provided a barrier to entry in terms of the digital literacy skills required to register a domain, set up the necessary software and, of course, design, build and upload a website. The upside was that your digital identity was yours.

      Why have we gotten away from this? In short, I think it's because it was easier for big companies with massive resources to do the initial heavy lifting.

      If we look at history, Gutenberg created the first printing press and guarded it heavily for years. Eventually others figured out how to do it and printing presses spread like wildfire.Now, with some modest means and some time, almost anyone can publish.

      With simple standards and accessible hosting people can now broadly own their own domain name and create their own websites using a variety of content management systems. In a few years, this will be even more ubiquitous. Facebook is going to be just like Gutenberg attempting to hold onto his monopoly, but failing miserably.

      The best part, I think, is that the speed of digital technology means that the Facebook edifice is going to crumble faster than Gutenberg's.