I was surfing the web checking out cheap 7 inch tablets when I happened across this
Of course it’s not a MacBook Air – it’s essentially a netbook with XP packaged up to look like a MacBook. And it’s not just one retailer, a couple of clicks brought up this one that’s a little more blatant ….
The first typewriters were in the main women, who were paid to operate the fiendish machine and act as some sort of amanuesis, as the great man dictated his thoughts.
This of course had all sorts of implications for society, allowing young women to earn a respectable income, and leading to the rise of the secretary as the prime late twentieth century female profession.
The interesting thing about the portable typrwriter and its adoption by journalists is that they themselves used it, hence predisposing them to better, lighter machines, and portable computers such as the Tandy 100, both as note takers and machines for creating copy.
Authors probably didn’t have that imperative and were consequently less likely to adopt wordprocessors unless they were fully featured rather than elaborate note takers …
Wonderful example of mid twentieth century official architecture looking as if it had been transported from the English Home Counties to somewhere in the middle of Gippsland in Victoria …
As part of the ‘not just travel writers’ strand I was reading Darren Wershler-Henry’s history of typewriters over the weekend and he makes the point that in Dracula – written in 1897 – the protagonists make extensive use of typewriters and kodak cameras to document matters – and hence demonstrate the modernity of their approach by using technology …
The birth of the modern is of course marked by the long wars, where not only where there new ways of killing, but new ways of reporting the killing. Again the portable typewriter, the small format camera, allowed a change in the nature of journalism, especially when coupled with reasonably efficient communications.
The tipping point for this was perhaps the Spanish civil war where there was something resembling modern reporting with community of serious journalists such as Orwell whose despatches commanded attention as did many of the photographers of the time …
On the back of the social media withdrawal and SOPA memes have you ever searched for ‘typewriter’ on ebay?
I just did, and there’s scads of them at fairly substantial prices, meaning people must buy them, but who?
I can sort of just about see that if you had a writing hut out in the bush with no power you might keep one just in case, but a solar panel, a couple of old car batteries, an inverter and a laptop seems like a whole lot better, especially given the advantages of wordprocessing software …
Over on my other blog I detailed my admittedly sketchy go publishing a book with Amazon Kindle publishing. At the end of the post I also included a link to an article from the Australian on the near death experience currently being undergone by scholarly monographs in Australia. (A subscription may be required to read the article in question)
Today brings a similar article in the THES:
Times Higher Education – Farewell, obscure objects of desire.
in which it’s argued that the costs of production will kill off the scholarly monograph. I don’t actually buy this scenario, principally because of the changes in technology.
The monograph is fundamentally a product of nineteenth century scholarship. Just as scholarly journals produced by learned societies were. Gentlemen were scholars and gentlemen could afford the publications and journals.
Life is of course a little different now. Gentlemen may still be scholars and scholars may still be gentlemen and gentlewomen, but the costs of subscriptions are no longer affordable for both individuals and institutions.
In the case of monographs the costs of production play a role. To print, store, and warehouse a book that will sell 300 copies costs almost as much as one that will sell 30,000 copies . Moving to e-publication – as ANU’s e-press has done – allows the electronic copies to be downloadable (either for a modest fee to defray infrastructure costs and setup costs or for no cost) or printed on demand saving the costs of storage and warehousing.
Academic publication is an excellent testbed for the changes in publication wrought by technology. The publications have in the main authors happy to slave for hours to format text and proof read for no reward than the glory of seeing their name in print, and no expensive advertising budget is required – most of the people likely to be interested in the topic either all know each other or know someone who knows the author – I’m reminded of Irving Finkel’s remark that all the Assyriologists competent in cuneiform could probably squeeze into a phone box.
So I don’ t see the scholarly monograph going away any time soon – I see it living on in electronic form, peer reviewed and suitably endorsed. It’s university libraries and presses that need to change to reflect the changes in technology
It’s not really funny to mock other people’s mistakes, but this one is kind of irresistable:
Japanese Department Store May Want to Look Up the Word ‘Fucking’.
I love travelling by train – I havn’t travelled on an overnight sleeper train in the UK since the mid-eighties, but they’re still running …
The overnight train to London isn’t perfect but it’s still magical | Herald Scotland.
Following on from my previous post on withdrawing from social media, this popped up about twenty minutes later
Email after hours? It’s overtime by law for some.
And for those of us without fixed hours what it means is that i’s ok to be offline, so yes, go for that walk in the park …
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