Showing only Notes + Links tagged books
Built to Last, Built to Decay: Authentic, Self-Reflective, Relationship Building Books in the Age of the iPad
Craig Mod, who clearly gets it, has written (and designed) an excellent piece on the future of publishing:
I propose the following to be considered whenever we think of printing a book:
- The Books We Make embrace their physicality — working in concert with the content to illuminate the narrative.
- The Books We Make are confident in form and usage of material.
- The Books We Make exploit the advantages of print.
- The Books We Make are built to last
The result of this is:
- The Books We Make will feel whole and solid in the hands.
- The Books We Make will smell like now forgotten, far away libraries.
- The Books We Make will be something of which even our children — who have fully embraced all things digital — will understand the worth.
- The Books We Make will always remind people that the printed book can be a sculpture for thoughts and ideas.
Anything less than this will be stepped over and promptly forgotten in the digital march forward.
Goodbye disposable books.
Hello new canvases.
I like the distinction between formless and definite content in relation to a container. I highly reccomend reading the entire piece, which also talks about opportunities for “definite” digital content that are presented by the iPad. The only point I might debate and expand on (not because Craig is wrong, but because he is not taking into account certain possibilities*) is that printed books should be “built to last.”
While digital distribution makes sense for high-volume, formless, ephemeral publishing like news and tweets, the fact of the matter is that digital content can exist indefinitely, distributed across millions of hard drives, but a printed object exists in one place at a time and eventually disintegrates.
I’ve saved a lot of links on the perpetuity of digital information but never created a standardized tag (perhaps I should use: forgetting?) so it’s hard for me to dig up references or even make sense of it. However, I recently read an article from a couple months ago called Our Digitally Undying Memories by Siva Vaidhyanathan, reviewing Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age that impacted me a lot:
The technological proliferation of the last 40 years has given us remarkably cheap information-storage techniques. Our powers to remember have shifted the default (for digitized information and culture anyway) so that forgetting is the accident or exception, Mayer-Schönberger asserts. We have moved so quickly from forgetting most of our stuff (or at least rendering it hard to access) to remembering most of it (and making it easy to search) that we have neglected to measure the effects of the change. Just because we have the vessels, we fill them. Then we engage with networks of data communication that offer so many disparate elements of our lives to strangers and—more important—people we would like to know better.
The thought of print as something that goes away reminds me of a hilariously conspiracy-theory-esque Gawker post analyzing the strength of staples used to bind The New Yorker versus The New York Times Magazine:
Could it be? Is the New York Times magazine perfectly calibrated to totally self-destruct before the next week’s issue (and ads) arrives?
Reached on Friday, a Times spokeswoman asked about reader staple angst denied everything. “I’ve never heard it,” Diane McNulty said. “In all the years I’ve been here, I’ve never heard that.”
If we expand our idea of what a book is, a novel can be printed on newsprint and bound with staples, so can a blog. The new distinction is about formless vs. definite content and object vs. screen. All of these design and production options can—and should—apply to the future of books.
The fact that books can get ripped, left out in the rain, smudged with food, given to a friend, bought from a used bookstore with a stranger’s marginalia, thrown away during a move, or left to rot in someone’s dank basement is a design advantage—or, at the very least, something for the creator to take into account.
I love finely produced books**, where the designer has shaped the experience I will have with buying the book and reading it. But designers who consider books-of-the-future as important for being physical objects need to also think about redefining what a book is and how we interact with it. What paths might a reader take that deviate from the standard: author —> printer —> bookstore —> reader?
There is magic in the kind of second-hand interactions (decaying, annotating, sharing) listed above that doesn’t exist in the same way on a digital level. When the Microsoft Zune announced a feature called—wait for it—squirting, allowing you to wirelessly share songs from your device with others nearby, Steve Jobs had something brilliant to say about the artifice of digital relationships and interactions:
Newsweek: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?
Steve Jobs: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.
In World Building in a Crazy World, Jonathan Harris writes:
Human needs that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online (at least currently). Maybe these needs cannot be answered online and require physical contact in all cases, but my sense is that they can, if only we design the right worlds to encourage and support them.
The content of books is one of the most authentic ways that we get to explore these things—as DFW said, “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being”—but what about exploring meaning through the design of books? What about designing books to be kept or shared, protected or beat-up, resold and then shared and resold again? In Objectified, a designer from IDEO (can’t remember exactly who it was) talked about sustainability as such:
“Most things I’ve designed are now in landfills.” I have to ask myself, “Would you be comfortable having designed this product if it washed up on a beach?”
Jumping again, but there is a parable that a Buddhist looks at a pile of trash and sees the trees and minerals that the garbage objects were originally made from and also the flower that will grow out of their decomposition. Maybe I’m getting too specifically into this crazy idea of growing, decomposing, circulated books as interactive art objects, but these design considerations can be subtle too. How can we harness accidental design? How can we create objects that take on a second life beyond their content? What happens next? What I’m really talking about is designing objects, and how we’re only moving into increasingly exciting territory. And, yeah, I’m really freaking optimistic about the future of print everything.
* I admire that the article is very focused, because there are infinite possibilities. My method of thinking and writing tends to be expansive, sprawling and often (because of this) indigestible.
** I have three of the seven books that Craig highlights as excellent examples of print and can vouch that they are, in fact, excellent.
Untitled from 10 D.70.V2 by William Eggleston
Hey, Hot Shot! - William Eggleston to Judge First Book Prize in Photography
The winning photographer receives a $3,000 grant, publication of a book of photography, and inclusion in a website presenting the work of the award winning artists. Eggleston will also write the introduction for the book, which will be published by Duke University Press in association with CDS Books of the Center for Documentary Studies.
That’s a pretty phenomenal prize for a photo competition. But, serious photographers only: “Each applicant must submit forty images from a larger body of work that, if he or she wins, would be the body of work from which the images for the book are selected.”
An interview with Kentridge wherein the artist comments on his own responses; these appear in blocks of white that interrupt the original interview.
Abbott Miller and Kristen Spilman of Pentagram have designed a gorgeous book to accompany the William Kentridge retrospective at the MoMA. I had the chance to see Kentridge speak about his work and the opera he is working on a few weeks ago and found that he is all-at-once academic, inspirational, and hilarious. Did I mention the work is beautiful too?
The Pentagram designed book, above, honors and accentuates the work in a variety of ways, but I was particularly taken by the design of this interview that was later revised and annotated by Kentridge. After one lecture it’s not like I know the guy, but to go back and comment on his responses seems so delightfully like him! I’m glad to see it executed so sharply in terms of design.
If I had to compare my spending on books to one of the states of matter (solid, liquid, or gas) it would probably be gas, because my book-buying consistently expands to fill my bank balance. What I mean to say is that I just bought We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion by Sep Kamvar and Jonathan Harris and it’s amazing. You can look at spreads from the book online and also play around with the wonderful application on which the book is based.
On my THIRD CONSECUTIVE YEAR(!!!!!!) of my Five Year Diary, which I love dearly, but just missed writing down over a month of my life because I left it at home and haven’t had the time to pick it up.
(via brocatus)
reference from sorted books - nina katchadourian
c-prints, each 12.5 x 19 inches, 1993
(via jennilee)
composition from sorted books - nina katchadourian
c-prints, each 12.5 x 19 inches, 1993
Have I mentioned that I love Nina Katchadourian?
(via jennilee)
[Everyone] (with the least bit of inclination) should write a novel, and society would be much better off for it. Like so many forms of introspection (in many ways the enemy of fundamentalists and political zealots of all stripes), it can be one of life’s great pleasures, but (unlike many others) is not one that falls into the category of immediate gratification (like say, that mammoth black-and-white cookie I just scarfed down). It’s sort of like running a marathon; you have to train to build up to it and maintain some discipline, but ultimately, when you cross the finish line (even if you had to crawl the last __ miles or walk part of the way), you’re going to feel a great sense of accomplishment (even — or especially — if you didn’t win), and for at least a few seconds have some warm fuzzies about being alive and completing something that nobody will ever be able to take away from you. Whether the novel will be ‘good’ or not — much less successful, however you want to define that (but let’s think about it in crass, commercial terms as opposed to a sense of accomplishment) — is a completely different question, and I tend to think that not so many people have it in them to be ‘great’ novelists, much the way only a few runners can ever expect to win a marathon, because I think it requires a certain obsessive personality that falls way outside the boundaries of what most people would consider ‘normal’ and often borders on the psychotic.Matthew Gallaway
(via Tomorrow Museum)
A new class of content for a new class of device
In which Robin Sloan nails it,
Apple: you did not invent a magical and revolutionary device so we could read books in ePub format.
Think about what the iPad really is! It’s the greatest canvas for media ever invented. It’s colorful, tactile, powerful, and programmable. It can display literally anything you can imagine; it can add sound and music; and it can feel you touching it. It’s light and (we are led to believe) comfortable in the hands. The Platonic Form of the Perfect Canvas is out there somewhere—it’s probably flexible… and it probably has a camera—but the iPad is, like, a really amazingly good shadow of that form. And this is just the first one!
So, we’re gonna use the Perfect Canvas to… watch TV shows?
Seriously: ePub?
Now, connect the dots. For all its power and flexibility, the web is really bad at presenting bounded, holistic work in a focused, immersive way. This is why web shows never worked. The web is bad at containers. The web is bad at frames.
Jeez, if only we had a frame.
Now we do.
Also, received this freaking awesome Whitelines notebook from Megan in the mail. Finally, a worthy successor to my beloved flexi-sketch! However, they bind them really, really poorly so I ripped out the coil and looped some thread in. Hopefully it will hang in there for a little while until I can get a proper cover on it.
Update: Whitelines creator Olof Hansson found my post via Google and let me know in the comments that there was a binding issue which they discovered too late in the process to stop the shipment. He also offered to replace the defective notebook, which I am totally thrilled by! Even in spite of the—now resolved—binding issue, I love Whitelines and think that their product and service are both top-notch.
Google Oops Part 2 « MiLK & toast
Megan posted these awesome images of scanning errors from Google Books. I had no idea that there are actual people wearing weird finger condoms who turn the pages.
Today, if we want to refer to a book we once borrowed, we can generally count on finding it again in a library or a bookstore. In the 18th and 19th centuries, though, bookstores and libraries were far smaller; though a good book might cost (as it does now) no more than a good restaurant meal, stores and libraries were orders of magnitude smaller.
As a result, readers habitually copied out passages they wished to remember in a personal journal or commonplace book. The custom had the advantage of calling the reader’s attention into intimate contact with those passages that appealed to them most intensely. By copying passages longhand, the reader gains time to reflect both on the meaning and the construction of their favorite works.
And, having copied the passages, you’ll always have your copy. Though photocopiers and scanners mean we can easily make exact copies at trifling cost, copying striking passages can remain a valuable exercise and a rewarding activity. A collection of selected passages makes a wonderful intellectual portrait. Shared with friends and colleagues, it also helps focus discussion and provides much food for thought: a manager’s commonplace book, placed online, can provide a superb tool for guiding organizational culture and strategy without imposing onerous and easily-resented training lectures or consultant interviews.
Notes About Notes: Commonplace Book
Love this description of what is essentially the archaic version of a tumblelog, mostly because it makes me feel dignified*.
I’ve read way too many crappy articles trying to convince everyone that their brains are being turned to slush by the act of reblogging. My view is that it’s simply the best way to capture an idea. As I wrote earlier this month,
A little over a year later I’m still adding to [Notes + Links] almost daily, and still frequently searching my own site for, say, something great I read about architecture a few months ago that I want to share. As Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum notes in her post How to Capture an Idea: “Search is really the key reason I feel digital storage is the best place to save other people’s ideas I want to build on. However well I label paper folders, I still can’t plug in “beijing” and “shoe design” or whatever and come up with several results in a snap.” Having this searchable database of my external influences has been really interesting and it remains the real reason why I keep feverishly posting Notes + Links with near-curatorial-abandon.
* Also because it’s from a site called Notes on Notes, how freaking meta can you get? So awesome!
(via the-space-in-between)
books (untitled) - gareth long (2008)
6.75” x 4.25” x 0.6”
four books
Salinger was one of the authors who everyone was forced to read in high school, but also the only one that nobody detested. Also, his books have the best covers of any required reading; I could spot those stripes from a mile away!
In the 1950s Salinger had a clause put in his publisher’s contracts that insisted only the text of the title of the book and his name were to appear on any future editions of his work, and absolutely no images. This hard line was particularly prompted by an early fatal experience with a publisher who covered a collection of short stories, then titled for Esmé – with Love and Squalour (after one of them) with a dramatic illustrated portrait of a seductive blonde. Salinger’s outrage is understandable: his Esmé is a precocious young girl of seven, and the story depicts a chance encounter and redemptive conversation with a solider on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, it’s instructive to see how various publishers and nationalities have dealt with Salinger’s legal one-liner over the past half-decade of reprints and new editions.
I have already set forth my convictions on this subject; but it cannot be emphasized often enough; there is no true meaning of a text. The author has absolutely no authority. Whatever he may have wanted to say, he has written what he has written. Once published, a text is like a mechanism which everyone can use according to his ways and means: there is no certainty of its maker using it better than anyone else. Furthermore, if he really knows what he wanted to do, this knowledge always disturbs his perception of what he has done.
Paul Valéry, Concerning Le Cimetière marin, in The Creative Vision, via Notes of the Author on The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Sometimes I wish there was as much good art about art-making as there is writing-about-writing; but I find that most excellent writing-about-writing applies pretty perfectly to everything.
I passed right over this beautiful, interactive, thoughtfully considered blog post, titled Metagames and Containers, when it came up earlier today on my Twitter feed. I should’ve known that it would be worth my time, because it was written and designed by David Cole, a designer at SF based Sleepover, specializing in “modern websites for magazines, writers, publishers.” If you care about design, writing, and/or publishing on the internet, then read this. I love what these guys are up to.
(via meaghano)
