How Books Will Become Machines / quote 20 of 21
Early printed books copied manuscripts
Thirty years after the ‘invention’ of the printing press, most of the books print- ed were just copies of medieval manuscripts. The ‘readers’ just wanted more of the same. For several decades, this paradigm-shifting technology essentially produced ‘old-styled’ books. Old-styled books made differently. Thus, while the user experi- ence stayed relatively stable during this whole period, a crucial structural change happened to the Book, introducing the potential for new forms of regulatory effects to its internal structure. Not only could books now be mass-produced but most importantly they were now ‘generated’ out of standardized typographic matrices. Even though in the early years of this first mechanization of the book, much efforts we made to try copy the layout and style of manuscripts, this transition imposed a controlled structure to all the copies of the same book. The regularity of this new internal structure had profound effects on the way we perceive the world. It literal- ly shaped our perceptions in an apparently irreversible manner.