Having just read Adrian Shaughnessy’s Design Week article on electronic publishing (as well as all the other iPad-centric artciles that have been knocking around the last couple of weeks), I’m left with some niggling concerns about where this is all headed, especially as the publishing industry continues to stick to the incredibly flawed and simplistic notion that the iPod/iTunes model will translate directly to publishing.
The beauty of newspapers, magazines and books is their accessible, dispersive nature. Libraries, hospital waiting rooms, charity shops, second-hand book stores, train carriages, coffee tables — books and magazines are everywhere, and in one way or other, accessible to all. Electronic publishing is great for the coffers of the actual publishers, but they have no reason to invest in the text’s life beyond the initial financial transaction. You’ll buy an e-book, it’ll exist on your electronic platform of choice, and then … dead end.
You can’t give it away or leave it somewhere for someone else or even easily lend it to someone. The whole idea of passing on knowledge through text – something we’ve spent centuries perfecting – could very suddenly take a huge backward step in the name of profit.
And what about those people (i.e. the majority of the civilisation) who can’t even afford the electronic device on which to read the text in the first place? Should we so blithely encourage the broadening of the division between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, literate and illiterate? Yes, I admit this hypothesising is all a tad extreme, but we are putting an awful lot of power into a handful of companies who don’t necessarily have a long-term view of how this technology is going to effect us. And it is going to effect us, for better or worse, really quickly.
Here’s hoping that there’s a Gutenberg or Carnegie out there who’ll be able to see things with a little more clarity and can keep the power of text in the hands of the readers.
I think while this skepticism may seem sound in theory, I have to disagree with the “dispersable nature” of books on the basis on the simple notion that sheer cost of many books today undermines their dispersive nature. Owning books have become more luxury than necessity because of the flow of information and it’s becoming harder and harder to justify paying for 20+ books costing 110 USD or 70 GBP each for college. Putting vital educational material onto hardcover may seem like a surer act of preservation but at the same time, it’s un-wired nature and cost of production makes it relatively inaccessible to many if not more than the digital medium. One can’t search for phrasesone can’t copy/paste, one can’t carry it in their pocket… Perhaps Europe is in better shape, but as far as Los Angeles is concerned, our libraries are broken, our public educational system is in shams and digitizing content is badly needed in many areas of note. That isn’t to say that print is dead, far from it, but print needs to be re-evaluated and redefined. Books were once information devices, but they’re more likely now seen as information sculptures. Because of the proliferation of information on the internet, there seems to be this reaction within the publishing industry, at least in the United States to make books more elaborate, more fancy to make it more special which in theory makes it more enticing to buy a book instead of to read a blog but at the same time, it makes it more expensive. Design book publishers do this all the time.
