Somebody in this region tried this some years back: design a garden, with trees, flowerbeds, shrubbery and all, alongside a highway - it’s not too hard to do, as long as there’s some way of providing a water supply and some people willing to undertake a bit of regular maintenance (here, along Provincial Route 5 in Cordoba, Argentina, had the fire brigade of a town nearby provide irrigation services but it went to weed when enthusiasm from the volunteer gardeners ran out).

I posted about this in my other web log, Q’s Place - but I’ll repeat it here: An initiative prompted by The American Horticultural Society (as a ‘new idea’: fair enough as no one has published it formally as far as I know): From small, manicured beds of flowers maintained by community volunteers to extensive landscaping projects along America’s byways, roadside gardens are taking root.

Whoever can take credit, it is a good idea and deserves support from any authorities, groups, anywhere in the world: a win win thing if there ever was one. Best would be a cooperative of individual enthusiasts but it’s hard to imagine that many people that would take on a largely altruistic effort - this is a place where town councils, state and provincial authorities can meddle and provide fine outdoor work as ‘jobs for the boys and girls’ if they must. Better by far than enclosing inexperienced youths in administrative offices so that they can mess up peoples lives with careless form filling and messed up data gathering (but that is another rant).

If you happen on this post - keep it in mind and if you can, approach anyone you can to get this show - literally - on the roads in your region. And if you can, spread the word through trackbacks and comments on your space on the ‘net.

See this morning’s Science Daily , from where I picked this up.

Q

I had  to delete the original post last night. Something strange happened with the formatting and it became a long narrow column (as used in some mobile services, I think). Here’s the gist of it:

Cordoba, Argentina - daily

<!– @page { size: 21cm 29.7cm; margin: 2cm } P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm } –>

La Voz del Interior, the local daily, ran a story on its crime and police section. In the city of Mendoza, western Argentina, a man (not identified in the report) told detectives that yesterday (for Wednesday July 23d.) he was stopped in his Renault 11 in the vicinity of the Military Hospital on Bulogne Sur Mer Avenue, in this city by a woman, about 45, who threatened him with a gun  got in his car and forced him to drive to a vacant lot.

The lady (sic) forced him to hand over all his money, then ordered him to drop his trousers or she would shoot. Once his pants were down she got on top of him and, with the gun pressed against his head, ordered him to satisfy her.

However,  he was so frightened that he could not get an erection. The furious woman pulled the trigger. Fortunately the gun misfired.

The man managed to escape and get home, where he told his family what had happened and then went to the Sixth Precinct and registered his report with the police.  The case was classed with ‘rape and attempted rape’ as well as robbery but was so unusual that it was derived to the Special District Attorney for Complex Crimes, Eduardo Martearena.

Denunció que una mujer quiso abusar de él (She tried to rape me, he said)

Q

Johnathan Morrow, on the  Copyblogger blog (founded in 2006 by Brian Clark and which is a very interesting and useful place to get stuff on this arcane thing of an Internet Presence has a very thought provoking post:

“How to be Interesting” - Copyblogger

All the sins of being a bore: I have committed most of them! Check it out, even if you don’t try this stunt of writing a journal on the web: I think much of the advice is very useful for writers in general.

Until next time, when we will try and be more interesting here, at Mostly by Knight.

Q

Drupa, the printing industry’s largest fair (held every four years in Düsseldorf) has ended … and this ‘brief tale’ turned into an assignment - fortunately, finished now: off line and in the hands of the client. Meanwhile, visit the site, it’s worthwhile:

Drupa

So this tale of books got left behind in the middle ages when my report was advancing into the future - would digital printing finally take over? What will it mean to us, as authors?

17 century printing shop

Johannes  Gutenberg’s invention of the press with movable type was a remarkable step forward.  His first production run - 200 illustrated copies of the Bible - ran off his press in 1455.  It was a huge success (but though Gutenberg had planned it as a business venture he was not himself to see any profit from it).

The world was ready for change at that time. Literacy was very low (tapestries and stained glass windows still told tales to the majority of people) - but would increase very quickly.  In art, science and philosophy there would be a  revival of classical knowledge (specially Greek and Roman) … almost everything was evolving, for many at the time “too fast to be any good”. But Gutenberg’s technology would remain more or less unchanged until the nineteenth century. Books did become cheaper and more accessible but reached a plateau as the cost of setting up each page remained slow and laborious - but once arranged the cost would be inversely proportional to the number of copies run off.

Though the plate pressed to paper has been replaced by a  sheet wrapped around a rotating drum, and instead of inking directly another intermediary drum is used (offset printing) - the process is still analogue:

MAN Roland offset printing press

Usually, an image of each page is transferred to a soft rubber blanket or roller cover - as the flexible material conforms better to the texture of the paper, there’s a sharper type. But for each page (no matter the number of copies) there has been an inked analogue set up (by computer nowadays) … and the cost of ink and paper is marginal once the print run is under way.

A newspaper’s daily circulation can be about five million copies in the West (and in Japan a remarkable twelve million!), a weekly magazine may be a few hundred thousand.

Obviously books are printed, bound and finished at a much statelier pace. But the setup cost is still distributed over the number of copies made.

So with this (the most common) technique, offset printing, a publisher gins most the longer the run - that can be sold of course!

Distribution costs (the other big item in a publisher’s budget) have depended on location.  These have been soaring, and are likely to do so more in the near future. One way  to reduce this is cost to spread printing presses around as close as possible to the main sales outlets, as in major cities (or within different English speaking countries in this language’s case).  But then the advantage of the long runs off a single press is lost.

Enter digital printing - big brothers of the  computer printer, they would hardly fit either you desktop or your budget as they may be twenty yards long and cost about a quarter of a million dollars: printing one sheet off a digital is much like the home printer though - the cost is directly proportional to the number of copies made …

Hewlett Packard Indigo Digital Printer

So far digital printing has not been able to compete with analogue (offset) printing but that may be about to change - improved technology  and as in all electronic devices, economics of scale have made it a reasonable proposition - and, as the cost is no longer spread over the number of copies made, digital printing is more flexible with the length of the runs.

An attractive advantage for Print on Demand publishing, where the book doesn’t have to exist until after it’s bought (so zero inventory as soon as bookstores catch up with the idea).

Digital, as shown at this years Drupa can improve on offset’s colour quality and has sharper images. Where digital printers fall behind (by a factor of more than ten) is speed: They are too slow for now to be considered for ‘ephemeral’ publications, as daily newspapers,  or weekly magazines. There are however other intriguing advantages - Xerox showed a new gel-ink technology, more precise and more economical than present inks.

So what does all this mean for writers? I think there may be increased opportunities for beginners - much as in the e-books (such as the Amazon Kindle and others reviewed below) publishers have less investment in the author’s work and could be more willing to run risks on those that don’t have names that push the best-seller lists. The down side is that there will be more ‘junk’ on the market - and the responsibility for good editing will be much more the writer’s, than the large publishing houses with their gatekeeper editors.

Time will tell. Certainly not as long as the Lascaux Cave paintings or the Bayeux Tapestry but a whole lot easier per published copy, even if not as long lasting.

Q