Engraving common ones and zeros

<<in progress>>

As I am enjoying a nice authentic Brazilian coffee my laptop alerts me with a friendly voice that an update to my new novel just came in. It is almost completed, and when we publish it online everyone in the world will be able to print his or her own personal copy. As I walk to my laptop I think how much the life of a writer has actually changed in the past twenty years, and that of the reader too actually. I guess it was bound to happen, with people getting more and more used to having all information at their fingertips, with the upcoming of the internet and especially Wikipedia. Not too long ago I would still write my books alone, in an offline text editor, and I would only show it to my editor when I had completed an entire draft. When it would finally be published and properly distributed people would have to go to a bookstore to buy it, and if it was not available in their language they had to wait for months or even years. I can remember how nice book store actually where, I did used to enjoy a coffee at Starbucks while reading parts of some random book at Borders or something, but man where those stores inconvenient. Now the bookstore has completely disappeared and replaced by millions of on-demand printing machines found in every major part of the world. No one could have saved the bookstore, not with our fast paced society. It started with the disappearance of normal educational books. I think Wikibooks actually caused this, but anyway, knowledge written by a single author became a thing of the past and open-source writing became the new standard. Then when bookstores only carried novels their usefulness swiftly degraded. I guess the bookstore could still be around for novels if it wasn't for our swiftly increasing multicultural society, it just wasn't viable anymore for stores to carry books in four different languages. And when artificial intelligence based translation services where perfected there was finally not a single use anymore for the stores. I myself write my books in Dutch but I could just go to a book printer with my Dutch book and have it translated and printed in English, or any other language for that matter. Those printers have come a long way too by the way. First they just printed in black and white on lose A4 papers, but now they print any color, have a wide range of different paper kind, can cut the paper to any size, and can automatically bind the books with a cover too. The final product is exactly the same as the old-fashioned professionally printed book; it's quite amazing if you think about it. Yeah the life of a writer has changed a lot, in a positive way I must say. I love it that when a book is done it is really done and ready for sale, money comes in immediately, no hassle with distribution and all that. Income has drastically gone up too, as I can reach the whole world with my one book, that translation invention has been a lifesaver.