After watching the woman print on the printing press, I now understand how much of an art printing is. If a computer printer existed back in the 18th century, there would be no art involved. But that would allow us to develop even better technology faster.
When we were talking about key words in Benjamin’s essay, we mentioned the word “aura”. Professor Phillips brought up the point that there was an aura to the room when we were looking at the rare books. I definitely felt that. It was not an ordinary experience to see those books and it felt like I learned more about them and wanted to learn more about them because of the feeling that there was in the room.
Browsing through the book “Complex Copyright” by Deborah Tussey I came across a paragraph discussing the Harry Potter series and the fact that “Rowling, her publishers, and Warner Brothers studios have already been involved in a number of legal actions around the world defending against claims that Rowling copied the works of others”(7). I think this just goes to show that when people have similar ideas (which is obviously bound to happen), they do not like to admit that another person’s idea of a similar nature was in fact original and more successful than their own. Perhaps this is why so many copyright lawsuits similar to the above occur.
Link to the online book: docDetail.action?docID=10518240
Earlier books that we have seen, such as hand-pressed books, might have ended up being far different than they are should modern technology have existed during their creation. For example, were later technology to be available during the hand-pressed book era, it is likely that the costs of producing these books would be much less, and that the price of the books themselves would therefore also be much less. In addition, I know that we learned during one class that there are some books that used to be produced using acid that literally eat themselves away over the years. If more technology was present at the time of the creation of these books, then I’m sure that these sort of “self-eating” books would not exist and that texts of this sort would be much more durable to time. Technology today is undoubtedly very helpful in making books better able to be preserved. The e-book is a very good example of this. However, after doing a bit of research on the e-book in order to get a better understanding of it I came across an article discussing the fact that it costs more to buy a book on an e-book than it does to buy an actual paperback copy of the same book. This seems a bit strange to me, as it should cost much less to produce an e-book then it should to produce an actual paperback book.
Here is the article: post.aspx?post=7fb568d9-f4a6-408b-9da2-4176dfa3f36c
A lot of posts have been regarding how as technology advances, many things become phased out, like books for e-books and paper for digital images. Even animation is now computer based. However, one thing I know about creating anime, while the process is done on the computer, handmade sketches are still used for reference. An artist sketches out a scene on paper which goes to the animator to use to create and animate the scene. It’s things like this which remind me that some old technologies die harder than others.
On a side note, production sketches can be bought for fairly cheap (considering what they are), which I learned from my collector friend. For those that are curious, this is my friend’s site where he shows off his collection along side screenshots of the scenes the sketches come from.
While browsing through the internet, I came across an old newspaper article from 1995 that talks about “the demise of typewriters”. The article makes a very good point about one reason why typewriters are better than computers. It basically states that during the time period when typewriters were prominent, libraries had exhibits of authors’ original texts that people could look at in order to see the way that each author’s story was developed and to essentially grasp the author’s thought process while he or she wrote. However, the use of computers does not allow for this to happen. Libraries no longer possess exhibits of rough drafts showing the progress of an author’s work because the “save” button on a computer allows people to edit their rough drafts and then save the newly edited one, erasing all existence of the original work.
Here is the article: me-23726_1_olivettis-typewriters-shuster
For one of my fourth hour requirements, I went to a faculty irregular lunch discussion this Friday. Though it did not address our course directly, it offered some interesting tidbits on the collaborative process of scholarly publication which I can expand into the realm of authorship.
I got the impression from the presentation that scholars in the Humanities are hesitant to take on collaborative writing. It was even mentioned that many scholars focus on their own work, a book, rather than seek publication in a journal. In retrospect, I regret not asking further on the subject. Why would a scholar choose to work on a book rather than publish an article? Perhaps, simply, the book is a hallmark of the academic and requires an immense amount of effort. However, I wonder if the idea of authorship comes into play at all in this trend. Does a book give an author more reputation than a published article? For my purposes as an undergraduate, both books and journals are considered equally scholarly and credible. I wonder if at the higher levels if their are any subtle differences in reputation between books and journals. Perhaps people only take you seriously if you have a book in your own name.
The easiest way the hand press could of been different if it had modern technology is if it was electronically powered like the machine linked below. There was no electricity and therefore it was impossible to have machines do work on their own without man power. This would have allowed for more books to be produced in a shorter amount of time and therefore more decemination of books at the pinnacle of their popularity.
Another way it would be different is the ads like the ones we saw on Tuesday in the books. They would be more like modern ads in magazines. The main difference is modern ads have color and they didn’t use to be able to do that.
I define “hands on” as creating a three dimensional work of art rather than “hands on” referring to typing in a computer workshop. The other day we ended class with professor Phillips discussing how manual labor has shifted from an art to an underpaid tedious job. I personally love working with my hands and one of the tremendous downsides to the recent technological innovations is the increasing under appreciation for occupations that deal with working with ones hands. Contractors and carpenters are prime examples of jobs that were once an enjoyable art form that have turned to a single leader paying impoverished employees (normally immigrants) under minimum wage to execute simple tedious instructions. Ive always enjoyed hands on work and wish I could find a respectable and profitable job that deals with the creation of some type of art through my hands. A literary influence to this mindset came from this book about why working with one’s hands leads to happiness. It describes the happiness one can acquire through creativity and self accomplishment through fixing things. The author then explains how skilled manual labor may be one of the only options remaining to a good living. Im sure there are numerous jobs that result with a happy living that do not require manual labor but i do wish to explore these types of options in the future.
If any printing technology from later periods of time were to exist when earlier printing began, it would be clear that printing and reproducing books would be significantly easier, even cheaper. In the case of lithography, type would not need to be set to print a new page. A new sheet of text needed to be made only once and could be reused for the amount of times needed. If the page ever needed to be printed again, the sheet would just need to be set again, without excess effort. This, however, would cut down on jobs. Vast amounts of time would not be used and an employee would not need to set up text every time a page needed to be printed. Overall, less employees would be needed, which would cut on costs, and less effort would be necessary, further cutting costs.
In the end, the process of making books would become more profitable for publishers, and with copyright, for the authors as well.