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. <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org