- The stele on which Hammurabi published his Code of laws in 1792 B.C.
- Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, 1454
- Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, c. 1946
- IBM 5150 Personal Computer, 1981
- Printing press, 2008.
Back in Hammurabi’s day, publishing involved a large pillar of rock. What we don’t often remember is that the pillar itself had to be quarried, carved, hauled, and installed in a prominent location. It was the immensity of the distribution task as much as the rigidity and weight of the medium that put publishing out of the reach of ordinary people. Eventually, paper took on the role of bearing published words to the reading public, and while a printed book is much lighter than a slab of basalt, the business of producing books and transporting them to readers is still a heavy task (as those who have helped us move my personal library can attest). Publishers and booksellers still need to estimate how many copies of a title to print in a factory, store them in a warehouse, ship them, display them on shelves, and deal with returns of unsold copies. Physical, bound paper books are probably here to stay, despite valiant (and ongoing) attempts by the likes of iRex, Sony, Polymer Vision, and Amazon, but we long to find a way for them to have the same lightness, flexibility, and remixability that more virtual media offer. Despite our love of paper, the heft and smell of real books, we long for a better way.
We’ve been spoiled by the fact that our computing technology has been able to perform a trick that the print-distribution industry has not: it has become small enough, and powerful enough, to let individual users shape and distribute their own digital production. We all know how disruptive that change has been to our culture and ways of doing business, but for all the seemingly ubiquitous changes, the core of the book business — producing and transporting heavy paper objects for possible sale — has not really changed.
Until now.
The Espresso Book Machine 2.0 from On Demand Books, printing Jason Epstein’s Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future in 7 minutes.








Joy to the World (Bruce Cockburn)
Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas is a tradition around here. Thanks to Quercus126 for providing this rendition. If you want to hear it played by the man himself, it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9PQWvP2hNE