On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 03:31:57PM -0800, Godfrey DiGiorgi scripsit: > On Feb 27, 2009, at 3:16 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote: >> ... Mass production books will soon be a thing of the past. > > Possibly.
The price/profit curve has looked bad for forty years. > Print on demand books like these from blurb.com and other vendors seem > to be on the rise, however. Perhaps rather than having huge volumes of > books printed, shipped, stacked, displayed, sold, returned, > remaindered, recycles, landfilled, etc etc, the future allows you to > find the content you want and output it on demand into a custom > printed volume, on demand, to read and enjoy. Books become special > things made because someone wants them, rather than because someone > wants to sell them. Bookstores become vendors of new custom-made books > as well as repositories of "read and done with" books that are being > sold to new owners. The volume will be maybe a tenth of the peak mass market volume, though, at the absolute top outside maximum. > Culture and society change anyway, but at least real books survive. ;-) Books only survive well on good paper with stable inks and labour-intensive sewn bindings. Those books, irrespective of what's printed in them, are expensive. Which drives the volume down. I think archival books will persist, but increasingly as luxury goods. Display technology is no where near peaking, either, and once it goes past 600 dpi it really doesn't matter what it is, legibility-wise. -- Graydon -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
