Interesting insight there Steve, I had never thought about how the brain handles a printed book. I really hope the new mediums don’t become gimmicky like that. I think publishers will eventually come around and things will pan out in the end, but it will take time.
I do think that small and indie presses can have a roll to play in helping steer the technology and the main stream presses into the future. It’s often much easier to try new things when you are a small entity. Once the new things are tested, the larger publishers will pick up on what appears to work.
I don’t think the paper book will ever completely go away (Man, I hope not!), but I think how we look at the written word will eventually be more digital than physical.
There’s a bunch of things that need to be added that you intuitively (yeah, right, I have a bunch of thoughts on that) get from a printed book that are lacking on an e-reader. That calculation, your brain does it automatically by how many pages are in your right hand compared to how many are in your left hand. There’s the visual, even with e-paper you interact with it differently than with ink on paper. You brain conceives of the text in a different format. But instead of doing these things, more than likely publishers will start adding gimmicks like “adventures you create yourself” or “multi-media (hey, there’s a word I haven’t heard for a long time) on the page” or (dare I say it) “color.”
Unfortunately it’ll take a while before someone in marketing actually listens to a designer that knows their stuff and can explain how printed books are actually quite sophisticated pieces of kit. How, when you put the text on a screen, you lose many subtle clues about the text that most people don’t even consciously think about with the book.
Interesting insight there Steve, I had never thought about how the brain handles a printed book. I really hope the new mediums don’t become gimmicky like that. I think publishers will eventually come around and things will pan out in the end, but it will take time.
I do think that small and indie presses can have a roll to play in helping steer the technology and the main stream presses into the future. It’s often much easier to try new things when you are a small entity. Once the new things are tested, the larger publishers will pick up on what appears to work.
I don’t think the paper book will ever completely go away (Man, I hope not!), but I think how we look at the written word will eventually be more digital than physical.
There’s a bunch of things that need to be added that you intuitively (yeah, right, I have a bunch of thoughts on that) get from a printed book that are lacking on an e-reader. That calculation, your brain does it automatically by how many pages are in your right hand compared to how many are in your left hand. There’s the visual, even with e-paper you interact with it differently than with ink on paper. You brain conceives of the text in a different format. But instead of doing these things, more than likely publishers will start adding gimmicks like “adventures you create yourself” or “multi-media (hey, there’s a word I haven’t heard for a long time) on the page” or (dare I say it) “color.”
Unfortunately it’ll take a while before someone in marketing actually listens to a designer that knows their stuff and can explain how printed books are actually quite sophisticated pieces of kit. How, when you put the text on a screen, you lose many subtle clues about the text that most people don’t even consciously think about with the book.