Computer Printers: Everyone’s a Publisher

Abstract

This chapter deals with the way that the price of computer printers has declined rapidly as their functionality has increased. I suggest that the new computer printers make everyone who owns them potential publishers and the existence of inexpensive print-on-demand publishers, such as Amazon.com’s Create Space, allows people with these printers to actually become publishers. I offer an example of my publishing a little book I wrote on English character and culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a new printing technology, 3-D printing, also called “additive manufacturing,” which has revolutionary potentials in everything from manufacturing to medicine.