When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago, he also gave us immovable text.
As electronic books push paper ones aside, movable type seems fated to be replaced by movable text.
Ever since Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type around 1439, making machines for putting ink on paper has been a growth industry.
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An upstart, Six Apart in SanFrancisco, owns three blogging services--TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type--that together run a strong second to Google.
The invention of movable type, an innovation of colossal impact, led to a proliferation of books and the dissemination of knowledge.
China, a country with over 4500 years of recorded history, gave the world, gunpowder, paper, compasses, movable type, and even the seismological detector.
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Six Apart was founded by husband and wife team Ben and Mena Trott, who developed the Movable Type weblogging software as a hobby.
For the most part, the last disruptive change in the book industry was back in the 1400s, when Johannes Gutenberg printed a bible with movable type.
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When the Internet was young, before Blogger, WordPress, and Movable Type enabled the public to easily publish volumes of information to the world, sites like GeoCities provided a free home.
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The printing press or the art of movable type that would trigger an explosion of Christian civilization, with the Gutenberg revolution in Germany, had been invented centuries earlier by the Chinese, but with no similar effect.
On a recent branding mission to China, we learned that every child in Chinese elementary school is taught the three Chinese innovations that changed the world: gunpowder, the compass, and movable type (Chinese ancients also invented paper currency).
Users are provided with hosting for their site and a Web-based interface where they can enter their posts. (Disclosure: Forbes.com uses the TypePad service to power its blogs, including one by the author of this story.) Six Apart also operates LiveJournal, a popular free blogging service, and sells Movable Type, blogging software which companies and individuals can install on their own Web servers.
The techniques of wooden movable-type printing are transmitted through families by rote and word of mouth.
One of the worlds oldest printing techniques, wooden movable-type printing is maintained in Ruian County, Zhejiang Province, where it is used in compiling and printing clan genealogies.
The movable characters can be used time and again after the type-page is dismantled.
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