The Evolution of the Modern Book: Understanding the Future of the Printed Word in the Context of Fine Printing Presses and Artist’s Books
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this digital age, it is easy to predict that print is dead and soon people will be reading nothing but e-books. I wanted to explore the world of fine printing presses and artists’ books, where print is still very much alive, to see what this sector thinks about the future of the physical book. I visited several fine presses and book artists in Northern California and England, as well as some libraries with unique examples of these kinds of books. I read books and articles about the place of the physical book in today’s society. My initial thought was that people who are involved in the process of making books that are works of art will feel very strongly about e-books and the encroachment of technology into the printed world. However, I found a much more varied response than I was expecting: after the press visits and reading relevant literature, there is no overwhelming outcry against e-books from those who love the physical book. Rather, some who spend their lives with books have realized the benefits of e-books and have embraced their possibilities, while others see fine press books and e-books coexisting side by side indefinitely because of their vast disparities. While it does very well to start the research in rare book rooms and fine printing presses, eventually the knowledge gathered in these places must transcend the academic sphere into the everyday one so that the twenty-first century world of publishing maintains a balance between print and digital.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.055 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.026 | 0.037 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".