CONTEMPORARY ERA

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The demands of the British and Foreign Bible Society (founded 1804), the American Bible Society (founded 1816), and other non-denominational publishers for enormously large and impossibly inexpensive runs of texts led to numerous innovations. The introduction of steam printing presses a little before 1820, closely followed by new steam paper mills, constituted the two most major innovations. Together, they caused book prices to drop and the number of books to increase considerably. Numerous bibliographic features, like the positioning and formulation of titles and subtitles, were also affected by this new production method. New types of documents appeared later in the nineteenth century: photography, sound recording and film.

Typewriters and eventually desktop publishing let people print and put together their own documents, using staplers, ring binders, etc.

A series of new developments occurred in the 1990s. The spread of digital multimedia, which encodes texts, images, animations, and sounds in a unique and simple form is a novel development. Hypertext further improved access to information. Finally, the internet lowered production and distribution costs, as did printing at the end of the Middle Ages.

It is difficult to predict the future of the book. A good deal of reference material, designed for direct access instead of sequential reading, as for example encyclopedias, exist less and less in for the form of books and more and more on the web. Although electronic books, or e-books, had limited success in the early years, the demand for books in this format has grown dramatically, primarily because of the popularity of e-reader devices and as the number of available titles in this format has increased. E-book readers such as the Sony Reader, Barnes and Noble's nook, and Amazon's Kindle have increased in popularity each time a new upgraded version is released. The Kindle in particular has captured public attention not only for the quality of the reading experience but also because users can access books (as well as periodicals and newspapers) wirelessly online (a feature now available in all other e-reader devices). Apple has also entered this arena with applications for the iPhone and iPad which enable e-book reading