Former book designer embraces e-books
In the mind of at least one person long involved in the aesthetics of the book publishing industry, people often place too much emphasis on the medium containing the words rather than the content created by the words.
Craig Mod, and experienced book designer, plus self-proclaimed computer programmer and publisher, draws on his years of experience in all of those areas to create a well-informed opinion of the future of the e-book, and of the book publishing industry in general. He thinks that we may be spending too much time worrying about the vehicle being used for the delivery instead of concentrating on the content being delivered, which is the proper place to put our emphasis. He sees some areas where the form is meaningful and other larger areas where it is not.
In the end, under Mod’s model, we should not be arguing about whether pixels are better or worse than paper, although that is the point to which most paper book vs. e-book arguments tend to devolve. Mod believes that it is much more useful to focus our discussion whether or not the technology selected is a good match for the content. Looked at in this way, the physical form of many books is easily disposable, according to a New York Times article. He says, “Once we dump this weight, we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so, too, does the need to fly dead trees around the world. For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence.”
Mod is looking forward to the evolution of the book as it is freed from the traditional confines of the printed page, at least in those areas where the printed page adds little or nothing to the content. He has a number of interesting ideas about where this evolution can take us, while still retaining an abiding love for the physical format of a book when that physicality adds more than just a husk to the content. His may be the clearest understand yet of where books are headed in the near and middle term.
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