RIP (Rest in print?)

I noticed this headline today, small and in an obscure section of a news website. Encyclopedia Britannica ends print, goes digital.

If there ever was a first nail in a coffin, another sign of change from what we grew up with, that has to be it. Well, maybe not the first nail, but one of the big ones. The venerable encyclopedia that has been in print since 1768 is going digital. No more rows of thick books with matching binders for students to pull down and plagiarize from to write their history papers.

I came into publishing in the days of etaoin shrdlu. (No, contrary to what people think, I didn't start with Gutenberg) For those unfamiliar with the phrase they are the letters in the first two vertical columns on the left side of a Linotype machine keyboard. You see before computers, if a printer made a mistake in a line he couldn't go back and type over it, he had to write to the end of the line and then eject the zinc-lead metal and start over. The quickest way to get to the end of the line was to run down those two left-side columns of keys to quickly fill out the line with the mistake and then eject it. Thus many a line reading etaoin shrdlu ended up back in the melting pot.

There are very few people still working in journalism today who ever worked with hot-lead printing, where to read type you had to turn it upside down and then read it backward in order to understand to make a cut on the stone as we called editing in the composing room. I did what might have been my first real editing "on the stone." The stone was actually called a turtle, the stone being only the top surface, a thick, flat piece of steel on which the lines of type were arranged into pages. When there was more type than space, the printers would leave the excess type on the stone for an editor to make a trim to make it fit. That was my first editing, making cuts on the stone. And that was my first job in the four eras of news production I have managed to live through.

I have seen the old lead printing change to what was called cold type, where the stories came out printed on shiny paper to be cut with an Exacto knife and pasted onto a page for a camera to shoot to make an offset printing plate.

I have seen paste-up go away when computers came in and the editor also became the printer, doing the work of all the people who lost their jobs in composing rooms around the world. At every step there was a sense of loss, of craft, of art, of craftsmen, yet we always embraced the new technology.

And when the chance came to edit in the newest era, web publishing, I jumped at it, though looking back there were some young techies who would tell you my feet were still stuck in the lead.

At every step jobs disappeared, people were forced into new occupations and many of them died. The International Typographical Union used to own a sanitarium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where union members made ill when the fumes of heated lead and zinc had affected their lungs could go. It seems to go along with recent trends, the home today has been designated a State of Colorado historical site.

I will admit to reading books on my iPad so I am just as guilty as the next person, but I can see an iPad just isn't as warm and cozy-looking as rows of shelves filled with books. At each step of the way it always seemed like there was still room for the old way and people who would cling to the established and then a few years later, the old way doesn't exist anymore. One would think something as venerable as the Encyclopedia Britannica would be one of the last to hold onto the book in hand. And what is going to happen to those ubiquitous encyclopedia salesmen who came to the door trying to convince you that $20 per month for the rest of your life wasn't all that expensive considering the huge amount of knowledge available to you. Come to think of it, I haven't encountered one of them in a long time. Another job lost to the downloadable book?

This announcement seems like a big step, on the loss side, but I suppose for those students still plagiarizing history papers, copy and paste is easier than copying with pencil and paper. Of course it might be a good idea to change the font or something just to make it look original.

Questions remain. What are we going to do with all those bookshelves? The makers of techno gadgets probably are already inventing ways to fill them, so maybe the bookshelf makers aren't in any trouble yet.

Think about the movers. What will the movers do? A 6-year-old child can move an iPad, but what happens to the guys who used to have to lift those huge boxes people insisted on filling with books when they moved? There are so many ripples.

And what will we do when the power goes out?