Books. What Are They Good For?
[ via John Gruber ]
This article about iPad / eBooks / physical books pointed out things anyone creating books / eBooks has thought about. How to present the content. I’m currently working on two books and so the idea of presentation floats in the day to day for me.
The author, Craig Mod, thinks that eBooks present in a “formless container” — a useful designation, and I agree; one reason I have so many posts on the index page of this weblog. Why not take advantage of the long form the web page can display? Enforced scrolling is sometimes disdained in web design, but a long page format seems a natural for the digital framework, far less intrusive than “paging”, which often leaves the reader suspecting ad views are the basis of the truncated content. The eBook form, at least as epub, is a web page really.
That said however, my take is slightly different than the author as to the value of the eBook “container”. Currently eBooks are a dumbing down of books as demanded by the limitations of technology. The nascent eBook form demands no aesthetic. Rather the technology has to get better. The formatting and presentation of books was honed over centuries. It contains the wisdom of those centuries in its form. Nifty eBook effects like page turning work because, like desktop folder icons, they are familiar. Sometimes familiar is good.
Did you see how engrossed uber-geek Steve Jobs was when he turned the page of an eBook in his iPad demo?
To his credit, Mod says each to his own. That some books work better as physical books. But some of his examples are dubious and vitiate his arugment; he admires some books that are art school high concept non-books — the tired postmodernist default, where idea and form are all, aspiring to drained coolness (what a reviewer at the NYR called “the dread hand of design”); or alternatively, he provides examples of handmade books, which are really craft objects and, in that same framework, old books, which are sentimental artifacts. Such stained warriors have an Antiques Road Show charm, but for the wrong reason, given his argument — i.e, their interest is not as books but as, once again, grunge craft objects.
One of the great unintended jokes of technology is that the more precise and golly-gee-it’s-real things get, the more grunged up, stained and flickering the most “advanced” digital creators get. Anal retentive precision forgets the soul of the image. The lack of content’s centrality in the high concept formalist approach to books is what drives people to the popular culture for content. Any content to which they can connect.
The idea that “new forms of storytelling” are intrinsically good seems a reach, both as content goal and format benefit. It’s not even clear if there is much new there. Such outlier experiments may inform more traditional storytelling, but we shouldn’t be fitting our inherent inclinations to the demands of technology. Vice versa. Good TV shows like Damages, and bad ones, like Lost, use time shifting to affect a new form of storytelling. But this tactic is an annoying artifact which does not serve the story or the viewer. The central argument: is a predisposition for the physcial book form inherent, honed by the generations into a wonderful “container” that speaks to human needs or simply a product of necessity?
My current feeling: Physical books are an expression of the genius of our species; the physical book as form, now established, is worthy of retention in the virtual world as well.
≡≡≡≡≡≡
