A few months ago, I read (in a printed magazine) about the intent of Amazon, the book seller, to offer electronic versions of many of the books they sell. As a reader of books and a writer of books, I care what they are like and what may happen soon. Even so, I now write on an electronic gadget called a computer, and I send my manuscripts to editors electronically. So, why should I care what form my publications take if my words are recorded accurately, and I am rewarded for my efforts? As a card-carrying Luddite, I have a strong bias toward the ink-on-paper method of communicating that I grew up with and utilize even today—although maybe not tomorrow.
In the last century, the changes in printing have been as spectacular as the changes in radiology, and most of them have been as beneficial. If Johannes Gutenberg, who invented movable type in the 14th century, had come into the country newspaper where I started work in the 1940s, he would have understood the printing process in just a few minutes. The main difference was that we had a mechanical typesetting device, a Linotype, which cast lines of characters from molten metal. Headlines were still set by hand from fonts of letters and other characters. The type was gathered and proofed by hand. Then it was loaded into frames, put onto the printing press, and inked mechanically, and the press printed and folded the newspaper. Then the type was pulled apart, the headlines sorted back into their font, and the lines were dumped into the melting pot to be used over and over. We had one linotype machine. A newspaper like The New York Times had several hundred, and the company that printed most of the country’s telephone directories had several thousand.
As a reporter, I wrote on a manual typewriter. The pages were edited by hand and given to the Linotype operator to set into type. It was all mechanical. It could be very efficient on a daily newspaper, churning out several editions with changes between each one.
Within a decade, things changed. Just as the invention of image intensification made a breakthrough in radiology, so did the shift to offset printing make a difference in publishing. Linotypes were replaced with fancy typewriters. New printing presses now used aluminum plates, which were etchings of the typescripts and photographs.
My successors compose their copy on computers and send it electronically to the editor, who corrects it electronically and sends it to the print shop, where the headlines are added and whole pages are pasted together electronically to make the aluminum printing plates. The whole paper can be sent electronically to printing plants across town or across the continent—all of this in a matter of minutes.
These days, more and more newspapers and magazines have websites that contain all or most of the content of what becomes their printed product. This is now true with most radiology journals, including this outstanding publication.
Get Radiology Tree app to read full this article<
Get Radiology Tree app to read full this article<