McGraw-Hill paperbacks designed by Rudolph De Harak — A nice Flickr set of vintage covers from Joe Kral, who apparently has an amazing book collection (via Words & Eggs).
Free Libraries Are Full of Books That No One Reads — Author Paul Theroux talks to The Atlantic about e-books (via The Second Pass):
I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past… but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object… I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Not Dead Yet — An interesting post at Personanondata on what the resilience of the CD format means for books:
Many believe the physical book will disappear within in the next ten years yet the example of the music CD suggests the future of the book may be more nuanced. The availability of electronic versions of trade content will approach 100% in less than ten years… Despite the availability however, electronic content is likely to represent only one of a number of ways consumers will engage with book content… Rather than disappear, the lowly print book may retain a position of wide distribution… and become the focal point of a facilitated interaction with numerous content acquisition options for consumers.
The information on CD sales in the post comes from a recent report in The Economist, which also ran an interesting article about the future of copyright on the same day:
The lawmakers intended… to balance the incentive to create with the interest that society has in free access to knowledge and art… Over the past 50 years, however, that balance has shifted. Largely thanks to the entertainment industry’s lawyers and lobbyists, copyright’s scope and duration have vastly increased… They are now calling for even greater protection, and there have been efforts to introduce similar terms in Europe. Such arguments should be resisted: it is time to tip the balance back.
The New York Times obituary for publishing executive and copywriter Nina Bourne:
The campaign she created for “Catch-22” is now regarded as a classic. Ms. Bourne was the most passionate in-house champion of the book, a darkly comic tale of World War II by a first-time novelist. Pleading for an increase in the initial print run, she turned to her colleagues during a production meeting, tears in her eyes, and asked, “If I can’t get this, why am I here?”
And finally…
Architecture Under Construction — a beautiful set of photographs by Stanley Greenberg from a new book published by the University of Chicago Press. Pictured: Untitled, Toronto, Ontario, 2005 — Royal Ontario Museum, Studio Daniel Libeskind (via PD Smith).
Gestalten’s Naïve: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design, edited by Robert Klanten and Hendrik Hellige, reviewed at The Designer’s Review of Books.
Served — Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin UK’s Digital Publisher, explains the rationale for their new (v. cool sounding) project for kids We Make Stories:
[A]s the debate about the value and price of digital content rages on, I’m testing out a new mantra on my suspicious colleagues; services not content. The idea, ill-formed as it is in my head, is that while we might continue find it a challenge to get consumers to pay for digital content, we might be able to use our skills, expertise and experience to create services that people will pay for. Services are what we do for writers, so perhaps there might be services we can create for readers.
Proof I think — were it still needed — that not all the most interesting book stuff is being generated in Seattle.
Friction — Laura J. Murray’s excellent critique of Brett Gaylor’s documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto for Culture Machine (PDF). Murray’s comments about a copyright ‘war’ and choosing ‘sides’ certainly resonated with me:
I’m not on any side, because I’m not in a war. Such language is a) a kneejerk echo of the Hollywood/recording industry message, b) offensive to anyone who has ever experienced a blood and guts war, and c) a joke to those who are not already convinced of the importance of remix. But most importantly, it is, d), an unproductive way of framing our current copyright challenges, because it suggests that the debate won’t end until one side has achieved total victory.
Amen.
The State of the Union — A big sprawling spaghetti post from the the chaps at Three Guys and One Book (loosely) about the state of publishing from the perspective of readers (mostly). I don’t agree with all of it by any means, but some of it sticks…
Less, But Better — A profile and brief interview of design hero Dieter Rams at BBH Labs. Just FYI — If I ever write a publishing manifesto (ha!), it will be called Less, But Better: A Publishing Manifesto. And just for the hell of it, here are Dieter Rams 10 principles of good design:
- Good design is innovative
- Good design makes a product useful
- Good design is aesthetic
- Good design helps us to understand a product
- Good design is unobtrusive
- Good design is honest
- Good design is durable
- Good design is thorough to the last detail
- Good design is concerned with the environment
- Good design is as little design as possible
Most, if not all, of these principles could be applied to publishing. Who (or where?) is publishing’s Dietar Rams?
And finally…
Big Gold Dream — Michael Fusco’s great redesigns for the Pegasus Classic Crime reissues of Chester Himes seen (of course) at FaceOut Books. Michael Fusco has some more great cover designs on his website.
(And a quick side note to publishers and designers — it was impossible to find decent hi-res image of these covers. If you want people share your brilliant work, you need to work on this. Ideally I want images that are at least 400px x 600px)
