Conversation

Replying to
These generation labels are for convenience btw, it’s all happening messily sort of parallel. Third generation. New rebundled forms emerge. Early chaotic mashup and collage pidgins give way to true deep-digital creoles. Threads on twitter are a good example. Instagram stories...
1
22
Finally, the *meanings* of dead “content” start to come alive. This is deep digitization. The “semantic web” failed because we thought meaning was something dead and inherent, to be modeled. Now it seems it is a potentiality to be expressed and enacted contextually, like genes.
2
26
Even our best visioning attempts, like the Diamond Age “primer” tech, seem impoverished and reactionary with respect to what is *already* happening. The idea of an advanced game world “book” for one little girl, with humans turking at the other end, seems dated.
1
19
If this sounds all head-in-the-clouds visioning, you haven’t been keeping up with tech (including ironically cloud tech). Much of this has already happened in patchy ways. Every year blogging becomes a little less like writing, and a little more like “idea engineering”.
1
35
All this frankly makes me ambivalent about writing in traditional forms like books or essays. It’s increasingly clear that these are a kind of Industrial Age larping. The thing that keeps me in traditional forms is mostly lack of skills/tools to go beyond, not sentiment 🙂
10
65
Picking up where I left on this thread late last night, a few more points, on print itself (and for context, I probably know way more about print tech than most people since I worked at Xerox and did a couple of minor projects on the future of print)
1
1
One great thing about software eating the *functions* rather than just the form of all printed material through deep digitization is that it allows us to take a fresh look at print itself, which remains an astounding manufacturing technology, even without getting to 3d.
1
5
For ~500 years we mainly used print as an idea prototyping technology because it was the cheapest in every domain from political ideology creation to game design. It still is the cheapest, but other things are getting competitive now. Like twitter for ideology prototyping.
1
14
The great thing is that now that prototyping functions are moving to other loci gradually, we can do a double take on print itself as a manufacturing medium. Print tech is really advanced now. You can print in rich color on a variety of surfaces, and put printed matter anywhere.
1
2
Since I no longer work in the industry, its size and profitability no longer concern me. I don't mind if it is 1/1000th the size (as is likely) and mainly used to print board games and cards and signage and interesting packaging. That's a great set of uses.
1
2
Though people outside the industry don't recognize this, already the bleeding edge tech is production on-demand high-end laser printers. There's almost nothing it can't do as well as, or even better, than offset, and very cheaply at run lengths of just dozens to hundreds.
Replying to
Most people think either big Heidelberg type offset printers OR home/office class laser printers when they think "print"... both breeds are gonna die out mostly. It's the production digital printer that will take over what remains of the future, diminished, but way higher tech.
2
1
It's not an artisan/hobby tech like letterpress. It's a high-tech sector. Right now, it's fueled almost entirely by... well direct-mail spam use cases. But I'm hoping it manages to shrink gracefully while retaining high-end production capability.
1
3
If you *like* paper and print, start thinking in terms of short-run, bespoke, personalized, high-quality and rich printed materials. That's why I'm very interested in things like zines, short-run indie comics, board games, card games etc. Collectively they represent the future.
2
16
I don't know the latest numbers, but right now, I'd guess the POD (print-on-demand) high end digital print industry is 80% direct mail junk stuff, 15% print-on-demand books, and 5% "long tail" use cases. I'm hoping those numbers shift to 5%, 15%, and 80%... ie reverse.
2
2
There's problems to be solved along the way. Back when I was in the industry, though the equipment *could* do anything (rich, full-color, short-run, with variable data in each copy), the most interesting print jobs were the least profitable.
2
3
What the industry *liked* to print was medium run-length (few 100 to 1000) low-area coverage (5% of paper covered with ink) with only a few colors. Going the other extreme tended to be both unprofitable and high stress on the equipment. I hope they've solved both problems.
1
3
Replying to
Perhaps now true for books which are mostly text. My experience of full color picture books is the cost is 2x what I would pay in a bookstore for similar content. That includes printing books and hosting on their website but not shipping and taxes.
1
1
Show replies