Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence.
The publishing industry has always wanted to make books as cheaply and as ephemerally as they could; it's nothing new.
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.
I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.
Books have become products, like cereal or perfume or deodorant.
The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.
Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little.
Books are humanity in print.