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Though the plate pressed to paper has been replaced by a  sheet wrapped around a rotating drum, and instead of inking directly another intermediary drum is used (offset printing) - the process is still analogue: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

There were many editions of the Book of the Dead, from Egyptian relics. It was a tale that described their notion of afterlife. An instruction manual for entry into the Afterlife. They were printed on papyrus generally, and paled in the sarcophagus or coffin of the deceased. It was certainly priestly work and not intended for the common folk’s eyes. The form became fairly standardized in subsequent editions, hymns and enchantments together with with a description of the voyage’s different stages - to his or her arrival before Osiris and final inclusion among the gods. Interesting to note that images were the main means of communication, with a secondary text or caption. Would there be doubts about possible misunderstand? Links to research can be found through Wikepedia. It seems The Books were mass produced by professional scribes in funerary workshops with blank spaces left for writing in the names of the deceased, as appropriate. The ‘cover’ price was very high and interested parties would subscribe while still alive. They must date from about 1000 BC to two thousand tears earlier, so as editions went, The Book of the Dead must be something of a record.

In 1066 AD there was an event that was worth publishing for royalty and common people to see. It may have been the single incident (as much as there is only one source for something as complex) that has shaped the English language (and the heritage of the English speaking world): William, Duke of Normandy had landed from what is now Northern France. He was faced by the Saxons, in turn descendants from invaders (or immigrants) from Northern Germany long before. The King of England was the Saxon Harold the Second. Poor Harold was having a rough time ( he had just repelled Viking invaders) but was abl4e to gather his troop and meet the threat. The armies clashed on the 14th of October, 1066, near the town of Hastings. The armies were well matched in numbers, between 8000 troop and 7000 (William the larger strength). The Normans had a huge advantage in tactics and weapons though: William deployed his archers and crossbowmen to weaken Harold’s army before closing, then followed up with infantry and finally overrunning the Saxons with heavy armored cavalry. The Saxons countered with a matching wall of shields but, despite ferocious fighting, at the end about 5000 English and 3000 Normans lay dead, bodies were cleared from the battlefield (Harold amongst the dead, from an arrow through an eye). William held a celebratory feast in a tent pitched over the location, and would be crowned King by Christmas that year.

It was a great epic, and amazing fleet action with three hundred ships, William’s poet leading the Normans into the clash, stuff of legend and assiduous embroidery (it isn’t a tapestry, despite the name) on a cloth 20 inches wide and 230 feet long. The plot is laid out with relevant details in images, annotated in Latin script. Halley’s comet had appeared shortly after Harold’s coronation (a bad sign for Saxons but an encouraging presage for William), and it’s also included in the narrative. Full of the stuff adventure and action, romantic detail and all.

The Bayeux Tapestry (Embroidery) was not portable of course. The reader had to go to the publication. Books had been around for much longer, and at that time they could be written with amazing patience … letter by letter and with beautiful decoration, generally in monasteries where the monks would inlay gold leaf with their pen traces. There were commercial scriptoria in some major cities as early as the fourteenth century. With agents and all, that would take orders from wealthy clients for the scribes and illustrators. Base material had migrated from extremely expensive parchment and vellum to paper. They were difficult and costly and generally religious texts. Chief among them in the West, the Bible.

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