A quarter of a century has passed since March 1991, when the Japanese economy plunged into a recession triggered by the bursting of the bubble boom. The economy has since been effectively at a standstill, with the average annual growth of gross domestic product standing at a mere 0.9 percent in real terms. Yet we are now enjoying a far more convenient and comfortable lifestyle compared with the past.

For years my profession has required me to send manuscripts to publishing companies and newspapers. Until the early 1980s, the normal procedure was to handwrite the manuscripts and send them by registered express mail. After the mid-1980s, fax machines installed in offices sent the manuscripts through telephone circuits instantaneously as long as they were not too voluminous. Toward the end of that decade, small fax machines for home use became available for about ¥100,000, and word processors relieved authors from the chore of writing by hand.

It was in the early years of the past quarter century that the Windows operating system developed by Microsoft Corp. enabled authors to write on a personal computer. Initially, the manuscript for a book was saved on a floppy disk, which in turn was sent to the publisher through the postal service. After the mid-1990s, the use of email rapidly became popular, enabling the author to send not only the manuscript but also all sorts of data as attachments by email in real time. A galley proof would be converted into a PDF file and sent back to the author.