Thursday, August 20, 2009
Are books dead?
www.youtube.com/qtv
"With the arrival of digital readers some in the book world are wondering if their industry will follow the music industry's lead of online content quickly becoming king over hard copy.
Chip Kidd weighs in on the subject. He's been called the "world's greatest book-jacket designer" and USA Today has labeled him "the closest thing to a rock star" in the world of book-cover design. Jian gets into Chip Kidd's craft as well. "
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4 comments:
Text heavy stuff could surely go this way...but the picture book...half of why p.b.'s sell is the physicality of them, they are already light, portable, and the action of page turning and taking part in an activity like reading a picture book is like nothing you can get on a flat screen. Pacing of pages, determined by the reader young or old is such an important thing to a picture book, it wouldn't translate to a flat screen. Picture books have something novels do not, the physical interaction, the experience. There's my 2 cents.
Definitely an amazing interview. What a treat. Thank you for posting this!
I side with Chip Kidd and Julia Denos!
Do I believe the Kindle or other related devices will put and end to the printed page, no I do not.
Reading from a printed book has been part of our culture for 500 plus years and little has changed.
Changing the idea of what a book is goes way beyond just a new technological advance it effects on a purely basic level of how we receive information. As it is right now some families can't even afford books. How will they be able to afford an expensive ebook reader if the printed page is dead?
(I would like to go into this idea more . . . perhaps in a future post )
An ebook also changes the way we experience reading. No longer will we feel the satisfaction of completing a page with a simple page turn, now like most things we will click a button. The design of the interior of a book has at this point been completely forgotten about. Mainly because the technology isn't quite there yet.
But still it worries me. An ebook takes the art out of the book. And this is my lively hood so it makes me anxious when it is threatened.
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