“As many bitter scientists have learned, history often credits innovations to the people who made them popular, rather than the people who actually dreamed them up. Gutenberg was no exception. He changed the world by manufacturing printing presses, not by inventing them.”

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Printing circuitry on a RepRap, May 18, 2012 at 04:01PM, from Hack a Day http://hackaday.com

im absolutely ashamed i didnt know this earlier

"The move is just the latest foray into print from Buffett. Last year Berkshire bought the Omaha World Herald Company, owner of Buffett's local newspaper and six other local titles. At Berkshire's recent annual shareholder meeting Buffett said he was considering other local newspaper acquisitions. "We may buy more newspapers. I think the economics will be ok, but it will be nothing like the old days," he told the meeting."

Fascinating

Text takes time. It takes time to read, it takes time to write, and it takes time to reproduce. Throughout the history of text production, people have been searching for ways to distribute the costs of producing text—financial, temporal—more evenly across a system... As text becomes easier and cheaper to produce, more copies of it get made. While Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in a small edition of 180, Manutius’s books were printed by the thousands. More copies need more readers and most readers like their text to be portable. While Gutenberg’s heavy Bible was best read at a library table, Manutius’s slim editions could be easily slipped in a saddlebag or vest pocket. You went to Gutenberg’s books, but Manutius’s books went with you. As increasingly numerous and increasingly portable copies of texts found their way into the world, they found new readers to buy them and they spread literacy with them... In the next two hundred years, text continued to get swifter, more portable, and more widely distributed, giving rise to a new form by the late 1600s and early 1700s: the newspaper. By now firmly established in Europe and North America, the newspaper’s growth was spurred by a flowering of global trade. Access to time-sensitive political news and financial information was increasingly important, and publishers strived to invent new technologies to meet demand... As the cost of mechanically reproducing text fell, the cost of circulating printed texts fell with it. According to historian N.N. Feltes, the fruits of the industrial revolution—like “paved roads, fast coaches, canals, and, eventually, railways”—made it easier to deliver printed texts to their intended audiences. Around the same time, firms that were known as “booksellers” shifted away from selling each other’s books and instead re-established themselves as something more like the publishers we know today, wholesaling their own books, but not, Feltes points out, “anybody else’s.”... Books were cheaper than ever to print, and they were cheaper, faster, and easier to distribute. Readers were increasingly aware of new books on the market, and, because of the new industrial age, they were increasingly able to find leisure time to read them, all of which set the stage for a flourishing of the Victorian appreciation and consumption of literature. Costs fell, distribution climbed, demand grew, but one variable was not improving. It still took authors a long time to produce a text... When a greedy and disapproving British government levied a tax on the newspaper industry starting in 1712, it grew over the next century to 4 pennies. Printers began producing pamphlets instead. Through a loophole in the tax law, pamphlets, which were larger than newspapers, were not taxed and were only marginally more expensive than newspapers to produce. While few people could afford the daily cost of 6 pennies for a 1- or 2-page newspaper, the occasional cost of a 12-penny (or 1-schilling) pamphlet of 48 pages seemed more justified. Printers naturally gravitated toward pamphlets and began filling the additional space required with more advertising, fiction, and other miscellaneous content... Some printers realized that this new content was more popular than their news coverage and began recruiting proven authors to publish exclusively in the pamphlet format. Generally, these small booklets were called “numbers” or “serials,” but more specifically they evolved into a range of forms including the part-issue, the three-volume, the bimonthly, and the magazine-serial. Effectively, the serial unbound the singular book, reformulating it into a series of installments. In doing so, it instantly appealed to publishers and booksellers by lowering risk.