240.jpgNormally I wouldn’t mention this as hundreds of books are released each day and this is not an “advertising” site. But I happen to love fonts and I think a lot of our readers do too. So here is the press release I received about the book:

London, 25th October 2010, Just My Type: A Book About Fonts is now available in the iTunes App Store as a book app for £7.99, published by Profile Books.

Simon Garfield meets the people behind typefaces and along the way learns why some fonts – like men – are from Mars and some are from Venus. From type on the high street and album covers to the print in our homes and offices, Garfield is the font of all types of knowledge.

The app was developed by Exact Editions, the London-based digital publishing company. Just My Type has fully searchable text, in-app purchasing and pageflow for easy navigation.

To see more features or to download, visit this link: http://bit.ly/JustMyTypeApp

Daryl Rayner, Managing Director at Exact Editions says that “the world of Caslon and Helvetica is really brought alive when reading Just My Type on an iPad.”

Rebecca Gray at Profile Books says “an app is the ideal showcase for this very visual book, particularly because Apple first introduced us to choosing our own fonts in 1984.” …

Just My Type is a book of stories about fonts. It examines how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. It explains why we are still influenced by type choices made more than 500 years ago, and why the T in the Beatles logo is longer than the other letters. It profiles the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, as well as people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook. The book is about that pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers, and typefaces became something we realized we all have an opinion about. And beyond all this, the book reveals what may be the very best and worst fonts in the world – and what your choice of font says about you.

Unfortunately, its not available in the US app store.

For those of you who love fonts, by the way, and have Netflix, be sure to look at the documentary Helvetica, which is a great story about the rise of the font and its history.

Update:  Exact Editions tells me that the app is not available in the US and Canada because the book won’t be released here until 2011 and the publisher doesn’t want to release the app before the book.  That’s a nice way to start out building ill will.

5 COMMENTS

  1. “Normally I wouldn’t mention this as hundreds of books are released each day and this is not an “advertising” site.” That’s a rather odd statement in view of the recent decision to post book reviews. And why book reviews at all, on a site devoted to the technology?

  2. I purchased Just My Type in Austraia for $16.00 for my 3 rd.gen, iPod with 4 th.gen. OS. The book downloaded without a hitch in a flash. Unfortunately it is the most difficut piece of text now loaded onto my device and to date he most expensive. The same thing for the kindle costs around $5.00. Each page appears slowly into a blob which the sharpens into readable text, a horrible experience since the book has over 300 pages to flip through. There is no copy and paste, no image copy, no email extracts. The book is a cheap slide show in slow motion. The defalt pages are so small each has to be enlarged with the pinch of the fingers but there is no text wrapping at the margins so then follows a lot of image manipulation which can be grumpy.
    I cannot recomend the format 2010 exact editions ltd have chosen. Otherwise the book is well authored. I would like to try and read this book on say my laptop, which at least has the print screen function, but I do not see a download or transfer to PC instruction. Even though to-days technology is a marvel, I cannot recomend this book for the ipod at this time.

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