"And you... want to hire us?" Prism asks.

"...I think hiring you or working with you would definitely help me?  I'm not sure how much additional help I am to the field of printing, though, so I'm...

"Kind of expecting that you wouldn't necessarily be invested or interested in the wider project?  I dunno.  Of the many things I've cursorily studied, business negotiation is not one of them."

"We don't have to be interested in whatever your thing is for you to hire us to do stuff," says Parsley. "But we need... to get paid..."

"And there's my problem: I don't have startup capital.  Which is hopefully where the rotary printer and ancillae help us both out: you get an increase in throughput, I get seed money because you're using my inventions to increase throughput.  ...Should see if we can develop a faster-drying ink, really...my brain for some reason suspects that there's alcohols involved, but damn if I know what fluid this thing uses.  At least I know a local chemist.  Maybe he'll help."

She has a highlighter, apparently.

"Oh, and the ballpoint pen.  Could probably re-make that easily."

"I don't think we have seed capital amounts of money even if we start taking in twice as much work," Prism says, as Parsley goes and gathers up all the dry pages on the racks and starts printing a new batch.

"How much does one of those cost you to make?"  She gestures at a press.  "And given that the limiting factor on throughput is drying...Well, I might need to get Wheat involved and invent fractional distillation or something, but if you had an ink that dried as fast as you could print it, you'd be getting way more than twice the work done.  And this dries fast enough to write with.  Let alone however my pens work, since they definitely do work and I've never had to worry about smudging them or the like.  Plus the idea I had for casting type with existing presses, which would allow you to do work with fancier type even if the drying doesn't pan out very well."

"If we had twice as many orders we'd... get more drying racks," says Parsley. "We don't."

"Ah.  Botheration.  Well, that's how the economy is, I suppose, and I'm not going to change it by myself.  If only I had any market data.  ...What's the state of the art in information dissemination, anyway?  And putting information together."

"...do you mean something other than books?" asks Prism.

"...Yes and no?  The process of informing people that new books exist, I suppose."

"Well, they have a rack for that in the library."

"And what about new things in more generality than books?"

"Like what?" asks Parsley.

"The construction of new buildings, changes in business ownership, births, deaths, discoveries of novel materials, the happenings of assembly meetings, changes in law, crimes, criminals, judgements thereof...Catastrophic events like a housefire..."

"The assemblies happen on a schedule, and you can see it posted in the place they meet. I think the other stuff - if it's actually important, not, like, some rich jerk no longer has a house - gets around by word of mouth, mostly? Or they tell everybody who runs a restaurant or something, I've seen stuff like that."

"Back where I'm from, 'the press' is more often used to refer to people in the trade of finding out new information, verifying it, and publishing it, than actual presses."

"- well, that sounds like a pretty different skillset than the one we have."

"Yeah, that's certainly true.  But it has to start somewhere if it starts at all.

"Also, you can sell ad space in a newspaper, so it'd be a great source of revenue, if journalism sold well in the first place.  I think it probably would.  Or maybe introduce serialized novels..."

"I think you have... too high a plans to capital ratio," ventures Parsley.

That statement prompts a wordless frustrated noise.  "...Unfortunately, that is probably true.  But I don't know what else to do."

"Well, I hope you don't starve before you figure it out."

"You and me both.  You're a business owner, what would you recommend as an unmet need in the present market?"

"I don't know why you think operating a printshop gives me information about that," says Prism.

"...Because you're part of the economy and would know at least your own needs if not the needs of those that buy things from you."

"When I try to buy a thing, I can generally buy it. I can't think of anything I set out to buy recently that wasn't there. There's mice and food and water and clothing and so on to go around. I suppose dreamward space is a bit dear."