The Alcuin Society announced the 2008 Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada this week. Utopia/Dystopia by Geoffrey James, designed by George Vaitkunas, published by Douglas & McIntyre, (pictured above) won first prize in the pictorial category. A full list of the winners is available here (PDF).
The Hidden Revolution — Inside Higher Ed discusses an article (sadly not available online) by Sandy Thatcher, director of the Penn State University Press, about digital publishing at university presses:
Thatcher’s argument, in brief, is that the peculiar challenges faced by university presses have given them an incentive to use digital resources in ways that put them somewhat ahead of their peers in the world of trade or mass-market publishing. Given the small market for most scholarly titles, academic publishers were in a unique position to benefit from short-run digital publishing (SRDP) and print-on-demand (POD) technologies.
Ten Grids That Changed the World — Swiss Legacy reviews Hannah B Higgins’ The Grid Book:
Charting the evolution of each grid, from the Paleolithic brick of ancient Mesopotamia through the virtual connections of the Internet, Higgins demonstrates that once a grid is invented, it may bend, crumble, or shatter, but its organizing principle never disappears.
Also: The Grid Book reviewed in The Guardian.
The Need for Balance — Novelist Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware on fatuous articles about self-publishing:
For most writers… the path of self-publishing offers substantial downsides and pitfalls… and successes… remain few and far between. These hard facts are way less sexy than the vision of a brave new technological world that makes it possible for (a few) authors to bypass the traditional route to success–but they are no less real. In my opinion, journalists who write about this issue have a responsibility to cover both sides.
Taking the Internet and Printing it Out — Ben Terrett (Noisy Decent Graphics and Really Interesting Group) talks about publishing Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet — a newspaper collecting some of the best blog posts of 2008 — with Nora Young on CBC Radio’s Spark.
This week’s Spark also has a neat interview with YouTube remix genius Kutiman. If you haven’t seen/heard Kutiman’s Thru You music project, check out The Mother of All Funk Chords.
“God Damn That’s A Good Looking Blue” — Winston Eggleston talks about his father, the photographer William Eggleston (whose work was recently used for the cover NYTBR):