On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ben Barrett <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks Paul, I again had the serious impression that some industry snobbery > (er, self-interest) might be generating that phrase "serious publishing".
There's a human tendency to think that the way things are done now is how things will be done in the future. I'll never forget a passage in the International Typographical Union's 1952 edition of Lessons in Printing, a seven-volume set of lessons that had to be completed by all apprentices. The introduction to first volume, Lessons in Trade Unionism, extolled the benefits of becoming a typographer. One of the claimed benefits was that the typography trade would never be obsoleted because human languages were too complex to be susceptible to automation. Thirty years later, the ITU --- at the time the oldest trade union in the U.S. --- dissolved because its membership had plummeted, almost entirely attributable to automation. Most of its remaining membership folded into the Communications Workers of America, a union with a focus on digital information. Which was but the latest chapter in a long history of word processing technological change dating to the birth of symbolism itself in pre-history. I see in some ways a similar technological revolution evolving with software business models. The proprietary software business model is in decline, in no small part because it has a fundamental conflict with the easy and inexpensive copying and dissemination of bits. Free and open source software business models that embrace that fundamental trait of bits are on the rise. Lots of people out there still stuck on proprietary software who haven't noticed that the earth is moving beneath their desktops. :-) Best regards, Paul -- Universal Interoperability Council <http:www.universal-interop-council.org> _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
