- A printing press is a device for evenly ink onto a print medium such as paper or cloth.
- The device applies pressure to a print medium that rests on an surface inked
made of moveable type thereby transferring the ink. - Its typically used for texts.
- The invention and spreading of the printing press are widely regarded as the most influential events in the second millennium revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they in.
- Even though printing involved a different mode of production, early printers used conventions of the scribal culture as they produced books.
- Printing was seen initially as a more efficient way of mass copying of manuscripts rather than as a totally new medium which would transform the way people read, wrote, as well as handled texts. Just as manuscript copyists showed preoccupation with surface appearance making sure that the copy was as close to the original, so did the early printers aim at producing printed books which looked very similar to manuscripts in surface appearance.
- Soon however, printers started seeing the advantages inherent in the print medium that allowed more things than possible through hand copying.
- Mechanical reproduction led to freeing of time that could be devoted to the other aspects of text production. This included appearance, meaning, as well as ease of reading which led to editing conventions very different from those used in manuscript production.
- Since a small mistake could be reproduced in thousands of copies, so a great deal of attention was given to proof reading and editing.
- Even the readers got involved by sending in the errors they detected which were corrected by issuing errata pages in the already printed editions and using corrected future editions.
- We now stand at another divide--between the print and the electronic culture-and we see a similar conflation of two very different modes of production. Print practices and standards are used to evaluate or produce texts in a totally different medium.
- Only slowly are we beginning to realize that inherent ephemerality, and transmutability of the electronic text changes the text's relationship to both the reader as well as the writer.