About reading and digital printing.

These notes outline some aspects of the issue of reading in a digital society.

Cleary there are issues here about h e terminology. ‘Digital society’ is not too helpful really, but it points to a basic technology transition between a time (circa 1990?) when almost all reading matter was still produced by printing presses and now (2010) when although the printing press is still a major tool of textual reproduction embedded in an economic and commercial framework that takes care of distribution and sale, nevertheless the significance of digital printing cannot be underestimated.

‘Digital printing’ is in a fact phrase that means nothing – for there is no printing as such for a vast quantity of reading matter that now finds its way into people’s hands. This is especially true for professional working environments where the distribution and reading of texts to do with policy, reports, strategies etc. are increasingly published digitally and ‘printed’ on a personal or workplace printer. But this is not of courses printing in the pre-digital sense of the term. There is only the production of texts suing common tolls such as wordprocessors to produce a data stream that is transmitted to a device that renders the text as an image on paper.

And while there is no doubt a huge and expanding marketplace for printed books even these texts are no longer produced in any ‘classical ‘ sense of the word printing – most published works are themselves produced digitally, and printed from a digital source rather than from any typeset original. It has been this way in fact for some time before the digital revolution when photographic platemaking techniques pretty much killed off the whole notion of hot metal. But now there is even less intermediation between original text and printed copy. So much so that, as with music, the notion of an original becomes increasingly problematic.

Labelling – see Gitelman

Printing techniques

PDF

e-Readers - are specialised devices liek these liekyl to survive or will th egeneral purpose tool (e.g. teh iPad is the latest incarnation) take over? Make sesne for your device to do mor ethan just handle books - issue is the reading surface - e-paper is so much better than a refgular screen. Of course, screen technoloies may change. What we need is a screen that changes its characterstics according to it purpose and use.