On PageMaker 1988 and the Tsunami of Crap

You cannot fight the power of good enough

Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!

NOTE: This article is not particularly pro- or anti-artificial intelligence technology, but is simply looking at what is happening and how the history of technological change can inform us on what is going to happen next.

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Thad McIlroy’s essay “A.I. is About to Turn Book Publishing Upside Down” in Publisher’s Weekly dropped a month ago to a lot of fanfare and no small amount of teeth gnashing. It is about the publishing industry as represented by the big publishing houses (of which House of York is definitely not!) and discusses how A.I. will impact all aspects of the business, from production to marketing.

I posted a link to it in an indie authors group on FB because I thought McIlroy’s point that “If you try to evaluate the opportunity through the lens of the coming A.I. apocalypse, you’ll have a hard time seeing the green light ahead.” I meant it to be inspirational, but he resulting discussion derailed quickly into diatribes about A.I., both pro and con.

Well, I tried. *sad trombone*

I want to talk about it again, though, because honestly the most critical observation he made is this one:

In 1988, when the Macintosh was hooked up to a Linotype machine, the improvement in quality was dramatic. But most traditionalists still argued that the “color” of the type remained poor, and that this lack of quality would be perceived by readers and rejected. The specialists—the designers and their publishing clients—had built careers in part around paying attention to the nuances of specific typefaces, and to kerning, line spacing, and the design of the printed page.

It’s not that this became unimportant, or that there was no appreciable difference; it’s that the new technologies could produce “good enough” quality—a new concept for measuring publishing output: namely, good enough for the vast majority of readers to be perfectly happy with what they were seeing and reading in the books that they purchased.

The fact is that “good enough” will always win.

In 1988 I was a fresh-faced eighteen year old, and definitely not someone who knew what a Linotype machine was. I had the rare advantage of seeing the impact of Macintosh computers directly because I went to a school that had a brand new “Mac Lab” paid for by Apple Corporation and featuring about twenty Macintosh SE machines which cost, in modern dollars, about $10,000 each. (Keep in mind they were much less powerful than the Pixel 7 smartphone perched on my desk right now.) The school paid for students to work as mentors in order to teach other students like me how to use a mouse because we had never seen such technology before!

A lot of us become obsessed with the Mac Lab. We camped out in there at all hours, eschewing the “old” IBM lab across campus with its “quaint” computers’ command line interfaces for the sparkling new GUI world.

There was already “desktop publishing software” installed on a couple of the Macs: Aldus PageMaker.

While everyone else labored over MacWrite for their class papers, I was trying to adjust images and figure out what a “gutter” was, because I absolutely had no idea what the fuck I was doing. I crashed that poor Mac a lot trying to import (small, ridiculous clipart) images to create a literary magazine called Modus Operandi, of which there was exactly one (1) issue that no one read.

(In retrospect, I really should have leveraged that experience after I graduated, but I just had no idea how important that experience was. Teaching moment: The value of having good mentors in college is priceless, and I very obviously had none.)

I did not care that the program was buggy and prone to crashing and that the printer (the then-magical Apple LaserWriter) was a beast that jammed paper every ten pages in. The output was good enough and I latched on to the idea that I could create my own publications like a duck to water.

That is what the energy I see from people learning to use A.I. tools these days, even if it means facing censure from friends and colleagues. They want to grab the means of production, and since self-publishing gained traction in the ancient times of 2008-2010, they know it can be done. It might not be great — not great art, not enlightened prose, not phenomenal storytelling, not wondrous book covers, not transcendent voice work for audio books — but it is good enough.

You cannot fight the power of good enough.

For instance, the book covers for most self-published books in 2010 were utter dreck. (I know, because some of them were mine.) They continued to be utter dreck for years. No one really cared other than the horrified traditionalists, who all stood by clutching their pearls while many self-published authors made a lot of money, and/or launched long-lasting, successful careers.

I see the same energy around A.I. assisted writing and art these days, especially when the cry goes up about “a tsunami of crap” which is just a rehash of the fears that went around during the early years of self-publishing and was, even then, just a repeat of what I heard in the 1990s about programs like Photoshop and PageMaker. The fear was that they would let anyone be a graphic designer and destroy the entire industry the the tsunami of crappy graphic design.

And they were right, every time. Yes, there were a lot of terrible self-published books just like there were and are a lot of execrable graphics created by random people who just need a flier for the block party or a banner for their new youtube channel. There will be a shit ton of bad content created using A.I. It’s true.

What everyone forgets is that a rising tide, or a rising tsunami, raises all boats.

There will still be wonderful books and book covers and illustration and marketing content, just like there is still gorgeous graphic design going on and there are brilliant books from self-published authors. There will be even more stuff that is simply good enough. And of course, there is and always has been a tsunami of crap.

(Honestly, the crap is due to humans, not A.I. but that’s another post.)

Back to the quote that prompted me to share McIlroy’s essay to begin with: “If you try to evaluate the opportunity through the lens of the coming A.I. apocalypse, you’ll have a hard time seeing the green light ahead.”

PageMaker circa 1988 is completely outclassed by Canva in 2023, yet there are plenty of people who look down their nose at Canva because it is not Photoshop or InDesign. Okay, I guess? I still put together a whole magazine in PageMaker using a Macintosh SE and a lot (a LOT) of patience. It was good enough.

We do not know and can not know what “the publishing industry” will look like in five years, because A.I. is just that powerfully transformative. What we do know is that there will be a lot of opportunities for all of us, if we are willing to look for the green light ahead and understand that good enough is just enough to lead the way.

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