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Though the plate pressed to paper has been replaced by a  sheet wrapped around a rotating drum, and instead of inking directly another intermediary drum is used (offset printing) - the process is still analogue: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

Stories are as old as humans, and publishing not far behind. These paintings record something significant, to some people (most certainly hunters) about 16,000 years ago near what is now called Lascaux, in France. We can don’t know why they chose to publish these pictures on the rock walls of a cave but can admire the skill and guess at the slow and laborious process it took these early artists to craft them.

They are certainly not the oldest paintings on record: there are some that go back as far back as 35,000 years - but they are accurate and beautiful and even now can tell us a little of something that happened long, long ago. We can ttrack our evolution as a distinct species from the fossils of the mortal remains of our ancestors, from leftover artifacts, but I think it amazing how soon painting and writing about things, in some form, began to come into the pattern of discoveries …

Painting and drawing is an obvious means of representing something. To produce the “whole picture” is just as obviously impossible and unnecessary. Some simplification is called for, some abstraction of just enough to show what the author meant. Then just show the little bit that makes the point as the details don’t matter (and much of those can be supplied by the reader’s (or viewer’s) imagination.

Skip forward a mere few tens of thousands of years and pictures became pictographs and hieroglyphs. Not quite individual letters nor completely understandable as pictures but strung together as language, well suited to the permanent task of keeping things on record. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh was recorded in Akkadian about 2000 BC and this portion in cuneiform script on a clay tablet tells the story of a Great Flood: The legend was already old , about 3500 BC and there is some evidence of the Black Sea being filled from the Mediterranean roughly around that time. Certainly an event dramatic enough to be recorded. Or maybe it wasn’t something that happened: early journalism or a work of fiction (or as some would have it, a Divine Message) whatever, the record stands - published.

So publishing goes back a long way. Forty thousand years? An author from so long ago can still tell his tale. Published in a durable medium with something worthwhile to tell, someone still holds our interest. Until later. (June 2d.- I changed the title, as this will be a series, maybe three parts, leading up to Drupa, the printing industry’s quadrennial extravaganza in Düsseldorf, May 29 to June 11)

Q

The Amazon Kindle is very expensive but selling well, apparently.

I was shown one recently and despite my love for books I couldn’t help liking the lil’ thing. It’s a cute gadget, smaller than I expected and the “electronic paper” is agreeable; not at all like a computer screen. It works like paper anyway; one reads the letters by reflected light, not transmitted: no glare, well placed buttons “turn” the pages: not all that different from a book bound in paper (and the pages won’t begin falling out as they do in our copy of Lord of the Rings among other recent books we’ve bought, here).

It isn’t the only reader of course, Wikepedia lists all these:

• Polymer Vision (2008)

• Astak Mentor (2008)

• GeR2 by Ganaxa (2007)

• Kindle by Amazon (2007)

• Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)

• FLEPia by Fujitsu (2007)

• Hanlin eReader by Jinke (distributed as Lbook eReader in Ukraine) (2007)

• Sony Reader by Sony (2006)

• ILiad by iRex (2006)

• Librié by Sony (2004)

None of this is new. To me, the only unexpected thing is that there are that many - although, come to think of it, there could be many more (some of those on the list are pretty obscure)

But what is astonishing is the discussion that’s going on about them. Publishers are on the way out? Good bye editors? Unlikely.

That the publishing industry is changing is probably true, we are seeing that from the writer’s side. As a beginner I have learned that my chances of getting published with a small press are very much better than they’d be with a large concern. Print on demand, where the book is made up and shipped only after it’s purchased must be taking over, and it surely will even with the big guys.

These are just the gadgets, the medium - and the medium is not the message, not in this case anyway. Yet much of the debate seems to center on the demise of publishing as we know it. Between the writer’s first glimmer of an idea for a story, and the reader actually getting one there is a huge amount of work. From the author’s personal “act of creation” whatever that is, through the draughts, revisions, critiques queries, submissions (through agents or not) , publisher’s front door, editors desks and tentative acceptance, more work with he writer, revisions - throw in a few rejections and start the cycle all over again or continue - to art work, and then (and only here) the printing, marketing, purchase and delivery and into the readers hands … between the writer and the reader there is a lot more than just printing so whether it’s done on mashed up trees or solid state screens, the process of printing a worthwhile book is the final product of a much longer gestation.
Sony

That much is obvious. Mr Bezos at Amazon announced that they would feature the POD books done with their own BookSurge company only (they acquired BookSurge in 2005, and at that time they also bought the European Mobipocket.com from which the Kindle technology is derived), but far less is said of the announcement by Penguin Books Ltd. , that they would issue all their new books electronic form as well as paper. Amazon is a retailer. Penguin is a publisher. Whether Amazon’s purpose is an attempt to grab the market, or to keep vanity publications off their inventory, or both, or neither or something completely different is irrelevant - and if it does hurt honest small publishers it’s despicable and worthy of discussion, but elsewhere.

HanLin Chinese/Ukraine?

The traditional editing process is a gatekeeper, hopefully ensuring that the reader is getting only the best efforts, from the better writers. I don’t think that it will disappear overnight. It may change, it may offer many more choices to potential readers (and thereby, more opportunities for us as writers). It is conceivable that something else may take its place or complement it. The new millennium is marked as the age of bewildering choices. We have so much set before us, all Glittering, New and Wonderful (admen and copywriters take note) that out task has changed from seeking out what we want to filtering out what we don’t.

In the long run e-readers will stay and take over. Us older folk, we get to keep our beloved books but they will become older and mustier. We can use the forests for something else (no we do not want to do Form WIMP-2548-ZING/b in re-quadruplicate , either). Vanity presses will also find life easier and there will be far more stuff on offer with no more than the authors own assurance, hope and prayer … but overall, we need the old fashioned editor, whatever form she or he takes.

And just imagine that one of these e-reader gadgets is offered to you right now for about $10 or £ 5 or a like amount of € …? Unlikely? Remember what we paid for an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, or a TI 99 (mine was about $3000 I think). Would you lay down ten bucks to get all the books in the world at your disposal. I think I would. Not taking up copy writing yet, in case you wondered.
Here is a link to a well-informed blog on the Amazon Kindle (not Amazon!)
Kindleville

Your comments of course, most welcome!

Q

Venezuela’s Mr Chavez ’s administration floats off political reefs that would tear the bottom out of much tougher and more serious governments (ships of state? ) Cristina Fernandez, Argentina’s President - the wife of her predecessor Nestor Kirchner - has a comfortable draft of agricultural produce between her policies and danger, with ample space to try out even the wackiest policies. Or not?

This report, from “The Economist”:

“Cristina in the Land of Make Believe”

Maybe there’s a tidy connection between Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez all from this part of the world and classed in the “Magical Realism” school of writing, and South American political culture with strong ingredients of Magic “Reality”. Room for at least one MFA thesis there.

They are favoured by their lands’ bounty and to a great extent, coincidence: they happen to have just the commodities (in large quantities, fuel and food) that the World needs most desperately - during their time in office. They can get away with a great deal of blunders and will try to do so for as long as they can.

Q