Print on demand, the balance of power between paper and pixel

Printing on demand had an extreme change on printing process. It has many beneficial potential to paper printing.  There are some reasons that printing on demand is better, it can save more papers, many people can have access to copies of book much easier, it can sell through websites like amazon, and people can avoid handling hard copy papers.  It also changes the fundamental of publishing books.

POD printing made the possibility for people and publishers to make PDF files and be able to sell them online within few days. As the essay points out “ Anyone can easily raise the nominal charge (typically much less than 100 euros) required to publish a book or magazine”. Furthermore, the only technical knowledge required is the ability to properly generate a PDF file you can also spend few hundred euros more, and have the POD generated it for you. For example, the book “My life in tweets” by James bridles in graphic format, which can be purchased for display; that made this possible to have tweets format.

I think it is more efficient to use, it allows the customers to choose their own content in which case that each customer have another possibility of POD is, people can update their content, so each content can be update all the time and it is by author, publishers, user and contributors.  It also makes it possible for huge number of printing on screen and it is easy to use, it is also affordable and more accesses able than actual book.

Overall I think POD had big impact on the way of publishing books and accessing it to everybody with easier way, that is cheap and pleasant, and it is almost about what paper is about.  

Ludovico Alessandro Post-Digital Print

         This essay discusses the issue of replacing paper with other materials to have better quality. It also brings out the issue of better quality in terms of reading things. But what Alessandro tries to point out is nothing will replace papers.

Alessandro clarifies the importance if using paper to read things, for example, newspapers are the most common medium people buy to read the news, however, nowadays most people prefer to read the news on their iPods and iPhones. He thinks it might be the end for using handy news papers that people could carry everywhere, in the train, at home, work etc. With the technology of phones the traditional way of reading news could eventually disappears. Another medium that have the chance to replace papers, is radio Alessandro brought up this point that the radio station doubled their schedule to give to news to people so they don’t buy newspapers.

    According to Alessandro’s essay, the “ printed medium seemed simply too slow to allow information to be simultaneously diffused and consumed”.

I think using devices such as iPhone and iPad is more convenient for people to use; they are faster and cheaper to have, and people don’t have to buy a newspaper everyday they can just get updates easily on their phone or even rad the news online. Therefore technology really helped to improve reading, however the paper is still not dead.  

William Gass response

Paria Saeedi

Social Media

1/15/14

According to William Gass’s essay there are specific things about books that we can never achieve on screens.  He describes book as something that he has a strong relation with and never let it go.

A book is something we can carry everywhere it is attached to us as part of our life for example, Gass says that books are like fish and chips wrapped around together can’t be separated from each other.  In addition, books on screens are not something we can keep them for long time, because we can’t own them so long. For instance, having books on kindle are a way to read to read books but the problem is they are not our books amazon rent it to us. We can also buy them but still Gass thinks we don’t own them like a hard copy book.

A book has its own goods that also can’t be reproduce the function that we can turn the pages over and over again easily, is hard to do on screen because the turning function on screen happens so fast that most of the time it misplaces the page we actually wanted to read. In hard copy books we can turn the page by hand and never have problem missing any page.

Overall William Gass think of a book as a life time friend that we can hold on to it for long time, use it easily, have it everywhere with us and even have nostalgic moments with it, for instance some annotate on the margins from college or high school. Therefore we love books we live with them and have possibilities that make them takeover screens.

The book that I own that actually became part of my life is a book called one thousand one year written by a Persian author. I got this book from the author when I was in middle school at his home that my friends and me where invited. The fact that I found this book interesting was that the simple story the book had to explain a unreal story about life of a person who becomes friend with stars however it is like a fiction but it actually teaches so many lessons about life and people.