Walking through the library and browsing through the books I stumbled upon one that was entitled “Printing in Plastic” by Patrick Daniel. The book was basically about how to build your own printer. One thing I noticed just seconds after looking through the book was that it was clearly written very recently. I do not think that it would have been possible hundreds of years ago for someone to build their own printer at home. Not only would it be way too costly, but a printer in every home was not the norm centuries ago. This got me thinking about how lucky society is today. After all, I think it is safe to say that the norm today is for each family to own at least one printer, if not more.
It is funny to think about the development process that printing technology has undergone. During the age of the movable type press, printing technology was purely used for large-scale production of books. Individual households wouldn’t even have considered owning their own device. Not only would it be costly, but with the enormous amount of labor require to produce a book or even a page, it is likely that they would have no use for it. Also, many people in these older times probably did not write that much, and so they would have no desire for access to such technology.