Other Sites

When I first got involved with the revolution of "desktop publishing" in the late 1980s, the most frequent comment on the new technology was the old A.J. Liebling quote:

"Freedom of Press belongs to those who own one."

The idea, of course, was that being able to create books on your home computer and laser printer was like having your own printing press. That was revolutionary, but as people soon realized, having your own press did not eliminate the high costs of printing and did not solve the distribution problem. Longer works like books still required additional manual steps such as binding, and the quality of home-produced printing was not as good as traditional offset printing.