Research - The Brave New World of Publishing (Book)

The Brave New World of Publishing: The symbiotic relationship between printing and book publishing

Manfred H.Breede

The book's remarkable longevity

• "If a measure of the worthiness of an innovation is how well it withstands the test of time, the book certainly ranks high among artefacts developed throughout the ages. Its aesthetic and functional design has barely changed for some 2000 years." (compared to hourglasses/clocks, old transportation/jet airplanes) "a Roman time traveler... Upon picking up a book to satisfy his curiosity, he would have no trouble at all in understanding its utility." p1

• "an economic method to communicate, access, preserve and disseminate information using an architecture that facilities visualisation." "The operative concepts in this definition that made the book the communication medium of choice for most of the last two millennia are communication, information, access, preservation, economy and ease of use." definition of what a book could be described as and why its stayed the same - what it encompasses. p1 

• "The past, present and future growth of book publishing have been and continue to be inextricably linked to literacy levels and technological innovation." p2

The origins and evolution of the book and printing process

• "the human desire to seek avenues of communication, so well embodied in books, reaches far back as the Palaeolithic cave drawings which are found in most geographic regions that were inhabited by out ancient ancestors. In cave drawings we witness one of man's earliest attempts to communicate human thought by way of graphic imagery. From these, primitive drawings would in time evolve to an abstract graphic coding system that we now call the alphabet." - The starting points of communication p25

• p25 - the paragraph on print processes. is this needed?

• Substrates and the issue of transportability : "The fundamental limiting factor of cave drawings was their immovability which led to the next evolutionary stage of developing transportable substrates by which information could be disseminated to a larger audience." p26

• Incunabulum: p31. Initially, the best process in creating a book was to copy an original document by hand and therefore to "increase productivity, the only available option was to increase manpower". 

• The business model 'sell and produce' used during medieval book transactions - "an individual requested a copy of a book, which would then initiate a process of producing or copying the book that could take months or even years of intensive labor by one or several scribes" p31

Overall this book is a great source of extensive research for my essay as it covers many aspects of the publishing process and notes distinguishes in the change of editorial design due to the change in processes.