I thoroughly enjoy these trips to different places to learn about the origins and the evolution of printing. It is amazing how our school is able to have these rare books at their disposal for educational purposes. I feel lucky to go to a school that has those kind of resources.
There is definitely a difference in looking at rare books online vs. seeing and handling them in person. In viewing copies, there is a lot of the work that is overlooked. Looking at old texts online is a very informative thing to do. However, it should not be substituted in place of looking at such things in person. Although our society is very tech dependent, much is missed in the fast paced world. For example, just from class on Tuesday had we been shown the books online rather than in person we never would have noticed the parchment covers, the hand printed cover pages, the smaller vs larger paged books, or the immensity of the 13-pound book. Although those details may seem small, they are still part of the history that we would have missed by viewing such online.
Going along with the difference between viewing things in person versus looking at copies, what comes to my mind is pictures. Over the summer my family always goes to the beach. Of course I bring along my camera and end up taking a thousand pictures, to which I compile into a slideshow. This year my brother was unable to attend the family vacation due to work, so I showed him the slideshow. (Keep in mind, we always go to the same place, stay in the same house, and do relatively the same type of things when there). To my surprise, although he is extremely familiar with all the places we went, he had so many questions! It was mind blowing how much is lost just viewing the experience through pictures, rather than actually experiencing it first hand.
An example of this is as simple as typing in the words sunset pictures on google, to which a whole stream of pictures appears in front of you. However what are you missing by having not been there when the pictures were taken. All you can do is look at their beauty, but you can not connect with them unless you were actually there.
I am heavily leaning towards using our fountain pens as the basis for how our writing utensils affects writing styles. I know it made a huge difference in my own writing style. Hopefully i can distinguish between the fountain pen and the ball point. Maybe even going into the use of brushes versus pens and how that effects the type of writing styles used by different societies.
I am not hundred percent sure what I want to do yet for my portfolio. However, I want to focus more on how our society has turned more towards electronic version of books and how this effects the writers and writing. Also, I want to look into why certain authors will only publish their work one way either electronic or in a hard copy. Also, I would be interested to learn if either version of writing is more economically successful to authors. Since some electronic books are less expensive than hard copies, I want to look into whether or not that effects the authors income from the book.
Copyright is both a safety measure and a restriction. It prevents work from being stolen or used without consent. But it also prevents fans from drawing too much inspiration from a work. In the various media communities, fan fiction plays a big role in maintaining and strengthening a community. However, copyright prevents these fan works from being easily distributed without gaining legal attention.
Once again, as a fan of anime and manga, I have seen things function differently in Japan. It not only seems like the copyright law is more loose, but fan works are even encouraged. Many places are known to hold conventions for the distribution and selling of fan made parody works. And these don’t just include books, but games, and even animation. Despite working on preexisting and copyrighted works, artists and writers are discovered and make themselves known.
I really enjoyed being able to view all of the pieces on Tuesday and see just how much books have changed from long ago. It really felt like I entered a museum when I walked into the room and saw all of the different ancient artifacts set up before me. One of the things that really left an impression on me was when I was told that the piece of paper I was holding was not really paper at all, but instead dead animal skin. I had been holding it in my hands for at least five minutes before being told this, but had yet to notice the tiny pores scattered throughout it. I think the fact that I had so quickly assumed it was paper I was holding shows how prominent paper is in today’s society.
I was thinking about the discussion regarding books becoming digitalized in the future when I began to wonder if this would truly be possible. After all, an era were to come where all books are digitalized, power outages would pose a much larger problem than they do today. Power outages are fairly common, as I imagine they will be for a long time to come. If books were only to be digitalized, then something as simple as the power going out for several days would pose a much larger problem than it does today. For this reason, I feel that books will never truly disappear from the public. Not only are they readable even in during times of technology crisis, but I feel they are really the only way to ensure that our knowledge will be passed down to future generations even in a post-apocalyptic world, where digital books would likely be impossible to access.
I am interested in how copyright plays a role in music and how the laws have changed and continue to change. I find it interesting that technology is causing to reevaluate copyright laws, so what does that mean for the future of copyright in our country? Is it possible to completely overhaul copyright law or should it be left the way people know it?
Our class on Tuesday raised a lot of questions for me about ancient text. The one question I really thought about was how much are all of these pieces of work worth? When I ask the question in class, I was surprised when the librarian said she did not know what many of the pieces were worth and if she did she would not tell us the answer. Since these works are such treasured pieces in our library, I would think that there would have to be some type of numerical value on them especially since they are from such a long time ago and represent such an important part of our history.
As I was extremely interested in how much some of these books were worth, I looked online and found an article about The Top Ten Rarest Books. Although I was surprised by some of the books on the list, the most surprising thing I learned was about what makes a book rare and valuable. I always thought it had to do with the content of the book which is not necessarily true. Collectors actually look for books “that are associated with a particular author or a major historical event or era, or simply because they’re incredibly old.” This information taught me that really the worth of books is just like an other supply and demand product it all depends on the buyers and the market not necessarily the actual worth of the good. Also, I was extremely surprised with how valuable The Gutenberg Bible actually is in today’s market. I would have never guessed just one leaf went on sale for $74,000. It just shows how important Johannes Gutenberg was for our history.
The presentation of the ancient texts we viewed on Tuesday was interesting and also enlightening. It was amazing how texts that were so ancient were preserved, allowing for us to take a peek into the past. This made me wonder, how will our generations ideas be seen in the future. Now that all texts are inevitably going to be digital there will no longer be hard copies. This means that there will most likely be limited or no hard copies for people thousands of the years in the future to view. I am curious if going digital will preserve our ideas like the papyrus or scrolls we viewed. On the other hand, our documents can be erased in a single click so it is possible that some or any of them may not be saved to seen by civilizations in the future.