Muckrakers, tabloids and wire services have been doing this since the days of Gutenberg and Marconi.
On the other hand, shortly before our show starts, Gutenberg invented the printing press.
Gutenberg's 15th-century printing press revolution succeeded in putting software at the center of the world.
Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into a printing machine capable of mass-producing words.
When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text.
Before Gutenberg, books were handwritten by scribes, and no two copies were exactly the same.
For centuries after Gutenberg, there was little change in the way books were made.
Project Gutenberg and Archive.org are the two main online repositories of downloadable texts.
Second, trashing the 5 forces model is like saying Gutenberg was so wrong about printing and publishing!
The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg's invention.
Before Gutenberg, books even the reading of them, let alone the ownership were largely the preserve of monks and the rich.
Back then, before Gutenberg, it was quite literally impossible for a scholar to afford the books that he might require.
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Ever since Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type around 1439, making machines for putting ink on paper has been a growth industry.
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The pieces include a rare Gutenberg bible, paintings by Monet and Matisse, and priceless 5, 000 year-old gold artefacts known as Priam's Treasure.
Then came Gutenberg's device and within 50 years Europe was peppered with around 9m books, and presses turned in 60 German towns alone.
During the lifetime of Project Gutenberg alone, the average time a book stayed in copyright in America rose from 30 to almost 100 years.
For the most part, the last disruptive change in the book industry was back in the 1400s, when Johannes Gutenberg printed a bible with movable type.
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Yet an idea that changes lives can have more power than an army that takes them--which leaves Gutenberg presiding over the 15th century, Jefferson over the 18th.
For contrast and clarity, it's hard for Gutenberg to compete.
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Not since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, or Alexander Graham Bell the telephone, has a human invention empowered so many and offered so much possibility for benefiting humankind.
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Gutenberg's successors are already working on more paperlike applications.
In this post-Gutenberg age, we have some better alternatives.
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When Gutenberg invented the printing press, he created a legacy that will be hard to dismiss in a matter of e-years (since time goes by so fast between new apps and phones).
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The best example of this is the advent of print: About 40 years after Gutenberg, as paper printing and paper folding took hold, books became portable instruments of a capitalist explosion of activity.
But when Peruvian museums boast artifacts from before Christ, focusing exclusively on Atahualpa and his predecessors is akin to being so impressed by books that you conclude world history began with the Gutenberg press.
The printing press or the art of movable type that would trigger an explosion of Christian civilization, with the Gutenberg revolution in Germany, had been invented centuries earlier by the Chinese, but with no similar effect.
The printer, since Gutenberg, had been limited to the function of re-creation: if you wanted to print a specific image or letter, you had to have a physical character or mark corresponding to that image or letter.
"We've also got some of the earliest examples of printing in the world, from the 1400s, from Gutenberg and from Caxton and a rare edition of the complete works printed by Kelmscott Press by William Morris, " he added.
"This is something interesting, " Weinstein says with typical understatement, lifting three volumes of a first edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the store safe sitting next to a page from a Gutenberg Bible and a signed Jules Verne.
Now, this isn't just a consumer tablet -- Spark's aimed at "those who love writing great software... using the typical Linux tools" -- but it will offer access to ebooks from Project Gutenberg, plus Qt and QML apps, too.
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