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.
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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”.
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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 🙂
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What, you guys still haven't solved all those problems and licked the fuser heating type issues??? I'm very disappointed in you :)
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Those problems are solved and the quality and consistency of the prints are quite good but toner is not close to the price of ink. Finishing operations were always a limitation: no company wanted to lead the way on this technology and the workflow remains surprisingly manual.
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