Morgan Bailey Photo Book Professor Caldwell 1/30/13
New Era of Books With the iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Galaxy tablets books have taken on a new form. They are no longer physical entities but instead downloads of text to be read anywhere anytime. There are pros and cons to these facts. The pros basically surround practicality and usability. The cons are more artistically related. Digital books can go anywhere a cell phone can. You can have hundreds of books chilling out in your back pocket while you do shopping. Dark in your room? Lack of light? No problem, these books have built in screens that light up so you can read them. Texts can be resized to help you read easier. With retina displays the text is just as crisp as print. With all these practical uses for technology to help us read and view books, books themselves are slowly ending. The sheer production costs of printing one book is more than millions of people just using internet they all ready pay for to download the book that someone uploaded onto a website. This does not bode well for physical books. Physical books however, with their sense of feel, texture, beauty, and artwork can never truly be digitized. Reading Hack The Cover made me realize how much art and work goes into designing a book. It made me want to put down my ipad and pick up a book and just appreciate how great a physical book really is. This brings up the struggle for digital books. Books of old have two things going for them, form and function or content. Digital books only have the later. How in today’s world can we bring form and elegant design to digital books to bring back the appreciation for artistry and design in books? My thoughts on the subject have to do with additional content and using the technology to better engage the reader. Digital books can be well laid out and designed but no one pays attention to that. People want to read these books, view the material inside them. Use technology to allow in depth looks into books. Video, movement, interaction all allows us to have a better understanding of what we are looking at. Books should start taking steps to engage their readers not only with text and photos but with interaction with the reader and the book itself.