 At their studio in Saga, the pair created a number of woodblock versions of the Japanese classics, both text and images, essentially converting handscrolls to printed books, and reproducing them for wider consumption.These books, now known as Kōetsu Books, Suminokura Books, or Saga Books, are considered the first and finest printed reproductions of many of these classic tales; the Saga Book of the Tales of Ise ("Ise monogatari"), printed in 1608, is especially renowned.Woodblock printing, though more time-consuming and expensive than later methods, was far less so than the traditional method of writing out each copy of a book by hand; thus, Japan began to see something of literary mass production.