Books, Design and Culture
I’m not exactly sure how the ideas in these videos by Dentsu London and BERG relate to books and print, but I’m pretty sure they do in some tangential way.
There’s a lovely sense of how new media can connect and adapt old media in interesting, unobtrusive ways, and it seems much more human-shaped than the rather linear idea that a new technologies must replace or destroy existing ones:
(via Russell Davies)
Comments closedI had an interesting discussion with author Jim Hanas (@jimhanas) on Twitter today about customers and education. It started with Jim’s comment (re-tweeted by Director of Digital Initiatives for Chelsea Green Publishing, Kate Rados / @KateRados):
“When you start trying to ‘educate’ your customers, it’s the beginning of the end for any industry.”
I disagreed, and said so. I believe education informs and liberates. Rarely is it a negative thing in life or business.
But as it turned out, in this context ‘educate’ meant something different to Jim than it did to me. For Jim, it was a sinister euphemism for scold, blame, bully, and punish. ‘Education’ was “code for ‘litigation.'”
If I understood him correctly, Jim was saying that to ‘educate’ our customers would be to repeat the mistakes of the music industry.
Needless to say, I don’t want to see publishers suing school children. For me, though, ‘educate’ means to inform, communicate, and engage — all things publishers should do and not just with their books. To educate means, for example, an editor talking about a new acquisition, a production manager explaining why they used FSC approved paper, or a designer explaining how to use their tools.
Until now, we have assumed that nobody cared about this stuff. But the web has showed us that it can be endlessly fascinating, and, perhaps more pertinently, that an unwillingness to explain what we do ourselves creates a vacuum that will be filled by others who either have something to gain or who find our lack of transparency and engagement frustrating (looking at you Hugh McGuire!).
Ultimately, then, I don’t think Jim and I were in true disagreement. We just understood a word differently. Perhaps the lesson is that publishers need to educate, not “educate”?
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