Keith Sanborn on Mon, 25 Mar 2013 07:39:08 +0100 (CET)


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Re: <nettime> Means of production: The factory-floor knowledge


One aspect which has not been mentioned yet in all this is the rise of the s=
mall press. It's a far cry from Anais Nin typesetting her own because no one=
 wd print them because of their explicit content. Books took longer to enter=
 the copyright legal battles because its a pain in the ass to scan them, tho=
ugh the graduate students of the world and a few obsessive others of us both=
er. Home recording technology from the 1960s on put the record industry tech=
nologically at risk; it was only digital distribution of ripped music that r=
eally made the industry sit up and take notice. Books were widely pirated si=
nce "piracy" had its modern meaning, i.e. when they entered intellectual pro=
perty control or even crown control. Argentina, Hong Kong, and the old Sovie=
t Union were all massive centers of book piracy in the 1960s and likely befo=
re and after, but they were essentially pirated for local markets and did no=
t affect home markets where books were originally published. Holland was one=
 of the centers for escaping crown censorship for French books in the 18th c=
entury, though clandestine printing went on in France and England and probab=
ly in "Germany" (it didn't then exist as such then) as well.=20

A few people are trying to do a small press ebook model like Paul Chan but I=
'm not sure how its working out. I don't think the financial results have be=
en good. Having published several small press books I can say that without D=
TP it wd not have been thinkable let alone possible. For us it has been a br=
eak even proposition. No salary, no profit that doesn't go into printing the=
 next edition. And we are not alone. More things have been published both wi=
th and without merit that didn't fit into the industry or academic models. D=
TP didn't create the small press but it certainly radically accelerated its g=
rowth. This point was lost in all the dystopian hoopla about the publishing i=
ndustry which mostly was worthless both before and after DTP.=20

Just sayin=85

On Mar 24, 2013, at 11:55 AM, t byfield <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote:

> morlockelloi@yahoo.com (Sat 03/23/13 at 12:18 PM -0700):
>=20
>> "Desktop publishing", now 20+ years old, had the same false premise.
>> Ability to typeset and print at home did not change publishing world
>> much. The same big publishers are making the same money today, and
>> choose what they want to print in pretty much the same way.
>>=20
>> What changed is that you don't have to go to the post office to get
>> tax forms - you can print them yourself.
>=20
> Normally, I like your comments a lot, Morlock. Even when you go too=20
> far out on a limb, your brevity and crankiness serve as a cantilever=20
> to balance it all out. But in this case you're way off the mark.
 <...>


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