After receiving the books and paper that Jiang Hongyan had sent over, Sheng Yan headed out with them.
There was a print shop just outside her residential complex.
As soon as she walked in, a woman greeted her.
“Hello!”
“Hello! May I use the paper I brought to print something?”
“What kind of paper? Let me have a look.”
Sheng Yan handed over what she was carrying.
The print shop employee carefully examined the paper and the book. The text inside was written in traditional Chinese characters.
“The paper you brought is rather thick, and the surface is quite rough…”
“That’s right. I enjoy collecting ancient books, so I specifically bought this kind of paper.”
“We have an XX brand inkjet printer here. It supports paper thicknesses ranging from 0.07 to 1.2 millimeters. The paper you brought should fall within that range, but I can’t guarantee how the finished product will turn out. We can print one page first for you to check. If you’re satisfied with the result, we’ll continue.”
“No problem, let’s print one page first.”
Sheng Yan also wanted to see the quality before deciding whether to continue. If the results were poor, there would be no point in printing the rest.
The printing was quick.
A single sheet was fed into the printer, and only a few seconds later it came out.
The employee handed the printed page to Sheng Yan.
“Take a look. What do you think?”
Sheng Yan carefully examined the page.
The result was quite good, even better than she had expected.
She had assumed that printing on such rough paper would produce blurry characters, but that wasn’t the case at all.
“It looks great.”
“Then we’ll continue.”
“Alright! How much do you charge per page?”
“We normally charge one yuan per page, and larger orders receive a discount. Since you’re providing your own paper, we’ll only charge fifty cents per page.”
“Sounds good.”
The price was actually very reasonable.
The employee then printed all the remaining pages.
Sheng Yan had brought a large stack of paper, allowing multiple copies of the entire book to be printed.
Soon, a thick pile of freshly printed pages sat before her.
Picking everything up, she prepared to leave.
“Would you like us to bind them for you?”
“No, that’s alright. I’ll take them as they are.”
She needed to send them to Jiang Hongyan so he could take them to the bookstore and have them bound there.
The modern binding method differed from the one used in his world, so he would have to handle that part himself.
As soon as she got home, Sheng Yan took out her phone and photographed the printed pages before sending them to Jiang Hongyan.
The moment Jiang Hongyan opened the photo, the stack of printed pages appeared before him.
After examining them, he found the quality far exceeded his expectations.
Hand-copying books came with many problems. Every person’s handwriting was different, mistakes could easily occur, and once a single wrong character appeared, that entire sheet became useless.
With printer-produced copies, none of those concerns existed. The characters were neat and attractive, and most importantly, the process was incredibly fast.
【Jiang Hongyan: Yanyan, I’ve received everything. The print quality is excellent. I’ll take them to the bookstore tomorrow.】
【Sheng Yan: Do you have any more books over there? If you do, I’ll take them to be printed right away.】
【Jiang Hongyan: Not for now. I didn’t bring much paper back because I hadn’t considered printing. Just the stack I sent you would’ve kept me busy copying for several days. I never imagined you’d have everything printed in just a few minutes. After I deliver these tomorrow, I’ll bring back a lot more.】
【Sheng Yan: Alright! The print shop is just outside our residential complex anyway, and it’s inexpensive. It only costs a few jiao per page, and it’s so much faster than copying everything by hand.】