A couple weeks ago I got to take a day off to go to a seminar on Internet advertising, especially as it applies to local newspapers.

As all too often happens any more, I was about the oldest person in the room. I could not help but reflect on how much change I've seen in the years I've been knocking around newspapers in one way or another -- it'll be forty next year. Let's just say that I strongly doubt that there was anyone else in the room that has ever set type by hand, not that I ever did a great deal of it.

But that is the way it was done once upon a time. Out in the front office there's a framed front page of the first edition of the Hudson Gazette, dated 1858. The type is tiny -- there isn't much in this paper that is as small as the body text of that paper -- and the part that amazes me still is that every letter on that page was taken out of a California job case by hand, put in place by hand, and when the paper was printed, put back in that job case by hand. Labor intensive? Good grief!!! Yet, that was the way it was done for ages.

If you ever have read any of those old novels from a couple centuries ago -- let's use Jane Eyre as an example -- you know that they're pretty wordy. Now, just remember that every letter -- over a million of them in the above case -- was set in place by hand. A huge job, and they must not have paid their typesetters much.

Still, the books were expensive in those days, because of the high amount of labor involved every step of the way from the writer to the reader.

The advent of the computer has severely cut the distance between the cup and the lip. If I wanted to read Jane Eyre today, I can download it from the Gutenberg project in a few clicks of the mouse, save it here, and read it at leisure.

Of late, I've spent some time hanging around a website where amateur authors post their fiction work for fun. Now, you have to know that these people are compulsive writers that are more interested in having their work read than they are in money, since they receive nothing for their efforts except for the occasional e-mail of praise. Yet, some of the stories I've read are amazingly good, grabbing my attention and holding it  without diversion while the big hand of the clock swings round and round past my bedtime. When you get right down to it, that's about all you can ask out of fiction, anyway.

Granted, there's an awful lot of junk, and you have to sift through it to find the good stuff. But that's true of any bookstore, too.

And that's just one way that traditional methods are heading the way of the linotype machine that the type of the paper used to be set on. It used to be that there was a lot of tedious labor between the producer and the consumer, the writer and the reader. Now much of that has been washed away, and it's obvious things will change even more than they have changed already.
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