Justifying Significance of Technological Evolution - Essay Example

Is it True that ‘Book Publishing Offers Us a Powerful Way to Look at the Relationship between Money, Technological Developments and which Messages are disseminated in Society Table of Contents Introduction 3 Justification of the Statement 3 Justifying significance of Technological Evolution 5 Conclusion 6 References 8 Introduction The discussion made in this essay critically explores the statement i.e. ‘book publishing offers an effective way to form a relationship between money, technological developments and which the messages are disseminated across the societies’. In order to justify the relevance of the statement, the discussion focuses on exploring the knowledge that development in technology has always taken knowledge out of the hands of the elite and made possible dissemination to the masses throughout the centuries. In addition, the discussion of the essay is developed with reference to a recently made incident/example in the publishing history of the world. Moreover, the evaluation of the truth will also be claimed in this essay through disseminating examples made in the book ‘The Economics of the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Book Trade: The Case of Ward and Chandler from the Book of The Economics of the 18th century’ by Ferdinand. Justification of the Statement The global publishing industry pertains its exceptional standing with the help of strong identity since its inception period. According to various authors and researchers, it has been claimed that the business of publishing books is prominent in terms of offering ways that encourage continuous growth of individuals and the cultural aspects of the whole societies as well. It provides powerful ways by disseminating messages across each individual and group irrespective of their nationalities. According to the critical evaluation of Feather (2006), the history pertains in publishing is relatively much more than the trend in the global publishing industry. Publish is a subject concerned to not just simply explaining about the way of publishing carried out in the past, but it also defines with reference to its productions along with its evolutionary stages throughout the decades (Feather, 2006). In relation to the key subject area of the essay, the statement explains that ‘Book publishing offers us a powerful way to look at the relationship between money, technological developments and which messages are disseminated in society’ can be duly accepted to be relevant and true. It is worth mentioning to the fact that an independent publishing through alternatives can be taken into account to justify the relevance of the statement. In this regard, the writers with sophisticated knowledge within a particular field and/or with narrower appeal are more likely to recognise considerably smaller alternatives to the target mass markets in the form of self-publishing and small presses. In relation to the recent phenomenon, the options such as small presses and self-publishing embrace two formats that are e-book and print on demand. These types of publishing alternatives offer a prominent path to the writers to generate financial revenue, as it enables individuals to make direct sales of their works. Moreover, the publishing alternatives help authors or any writers to deliver their works directly to the readers, which further lower the costs and help them to make more money than other conventional publishing formats (Feather, 2005). The book publishing industry has recently experienced with major rumours due to its sluggish growth throughout the years for the emergence of online media in terms of collecting attention of the global readers. In the context of determining the relationship of publishing with technological development, the evolution of online media is one of the major developments in the recent day context. The revolution in the digital media along with continuous evolution in the online market has substantially escalated the use of publishing materials in the academic sectors (Ferdinand, n.d.). In this sector, the advent of advanced technological aspects especially in the online media has provided major support to the writers in terms of making publishing or delivering works online to the prospective readers. In addition, the evolution of social networking domain as well as advanced online document sharing process has provided an independent ability to the writers and towards disseminating their works to the prospective readers irrespective of their geographical locations. The use of online niche marketing also enables writers to acquire the attention of the readers and societies by sharing and selling their disseminated works (Albach, 1997; Feather, 2006). Justifying significance of Technological Evolution According to an understanding of the statement, it has been identified that rapid development in technology is a major aspect in the modern publishing industry that can offer major support to the writers to gain their deserved position in any particular subject area. With reference to the modern phenomenal growth in the technological landscape, the statement made in this study entails adequate justifications. Sharing of academic works or any illustration of the social dissemination through advanced online media provides adequate opportunity to the writers to transmit their knowledge out of their hands and spread to the prospective masses (Stein, 2008). Beside the advent of cutting edge technology based tools for disseminating knowledge, the use of newspapers and traditional books are the primary and crucial source of information. Certainly, the numbers of titles that are published also continue to increase their volumes to meet the needs of the global readers in the current publishing industry. The use of advanced and cutting-edge technological tools have been emerged due to their ease of accessibility along with availability of required academic and social information from different local and global sources (Ferdinand, n.d.). According to various study, it has been claimed that the technological changes is significantly having major impact on the overall publishing industry and is incomparable since the period of Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. At the same time, a substantial growth in the rate of literacy and income levels across the European and Northern American region had developed an unprecedented opportunity for the book selling and publishing business industry. During that period, strengthening copyright along with continuous expansion of the public libraries and bookstores has been critically recognised to play a pivotal role in the global publishing industry in the nineteenth century (Albach, 1997; Ferdinand, n.d.). The evolutionary stages of technology throughout the centuries have brought a number of publishing alternatives for the writers to spread their knowledge from their hands and disseminate their work through a wider network. In this regard, the use of web-publishing tools for disseminating academic and social works to the online users can increase opportunities for the writers in the modern publishing practices. In addition, the process of encouraging self-publishing of the academic and social works of the writers and disseminate them to a large number of users is also a major aspect of technology throughout the centuries. In addition, the development in the field of social media has been identified to develop better relationship with people and especially youths, which is an important consideration for managing a balance between money, messages and technology in terms of book publishing (Natarajan & Kaliyan, 2009). Conclusion According to a critical understanding of the statement discussed in this essay, it is evident that book publishing offers a number of powerful paths due to its strong bond with the economic and technology developments that are emerged throughout the centuries. In this context, the rapid evolution in technological development is one of the key determinants that enable a wider network to the writers to sustain in the competitive publishing industry. The continuous evolution in the online media as well as different other web-based tools has substantially increased the potentiality of the authors to determine their own growth and prosperity. The development in technology has long been witnessed towards providing a wider domain for the publishers and authors to acquire their desired goal of sharing knowledge and experience to a large number of prospective readers. The transformation of the electronic publishing along with different advanced web-publishing tools has been observed as few of the major factors in the book publishing industry. References Albach, P., 1997. Book Publishing. Bellagio Publishing Network, pp. 318-327. Ferdinand, C. Y., No Date. The Economics of the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Book Trade: The Case of Ward and Chandler. The Economics o/the Eighteenth-Century Provincial Book Trade, pp. 42-56. Feather, J., 2006. A History of British Publishing - Second Edition. Taylor & Francis. Feather, J., 2005. A History of Publishing, 2nd Edition. Routledge. Natarajan, M. & Kaliyan, S., 2009. Roles of Libraries and Publishers in Knowledge Access and Management. Vision and Roles of the Future Academic Libraries. 159-164 Stein, M., 2008. When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency. Chelsea Green Publishing. Read More