The move to the Net was, in her opinion, part of a long evolution toward a new form of decentralized publishing. She recalled when the great houses didn’t farm out editing and other tasks as often as they do today, and when almost every book took nine months to reach the stores. “Back in the late ’70s when I was at Little, Brown,” she said, “we needed to get special permission to use Ex. When an author wanted his sales figures, I’d walk up the street to the top floor of a separate building where Rose, the lady with the P & L cards, had been keeping tabs for twenty years, and I’d sign out the neatly penciled card and carefully carry it to my boss, wrapping it in plastic against the weather if necessary. I passed the copyediting department with their well-stocked reference library, a bastion against inaccuracies, and the design department, smelling of wax, hung with rulers, sizing wheels, and X-acto knives.”[4.20] The industry, though, had changed; now freelancers throughout the country, not just in New York or Boston, were often editing and even publishing books. Fillmore herself had gone into freelance editorial work years before, and she still remembered “the shrinking feeling in my stomach the first time I bought a computer setup back in 1984: $10,000 of the bank’s money for an XT and an HP LaserJet. The salesman left, I was back at the C prompt, and the room grew dark. No matter which buttons I pushed, ‘Abort, Retry, Ignore’ glared back persistently. Finally, I chose none of the above and unplugged the whole thing.”[4.21] Fillmore overcame her technophobia, but the chaos of change still made her uncomfortable. “Increasing speed and volume have led to high job turnover, a blurring of disciplines. Our computerized tools allow the editor to become a typist, a designer, and a type-setter, the designer becomes a software junkie, a graphic artist, a prepress house. No time for galleys! Straight to pages! No time for pages; straight to film. The drop dead date is bottom line. Sales are needed this quarter.”[4.22] Years ago, competition had reached the point where many typesetting jobs left the United States. “We even hired freelancers thirdhand in Singapore and Haiti,” Fillmore recalled in a speech. “The publisher hired me; I hired someone stateside to hire someone in-country to hire the keyboarder and, still, the publisher ended paying maybe half what the job would have cost him at $15 per hour. Our topic today is slavery.”[4.23]