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From Shelf Awareness:

It’s a transatlantic trend: both the New York Times and the Guardian investigate the efforts by many publishers, in the age of e-books and e-readers, to improve production values of printed books, making them more elegant and even adding illustrations to fiction. As the Times summed up: “Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions–deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.”

More in the article.

7 COMMENTS

  1. Digital technologies have advanced the paper book as much as the networked screen book. Advances in the physical book include new book papers, inks, adhesives and covering materials made possible with digital automation of manufacturing. As significant, competition presented by screen books has prompted identification and accentuation of exclusive paper book attributes. Some of these attributes are constraints difficult for screen book advocate appreciation. For example each paper book conveys only a single title. This obvious limitation has, never the less, enabled organization, reorganization and visualization of libraries, engendered an economic base for publishing, and validated academic and literary achievement.

    Another seeming limitation of the physical book is its fuse together of the storage and display functions. This integration, so disordered with the screen book, has long proven a sustainable and cheap assurance for cultural transmission. Screen books decouple storage and display breeding multiple, uncertain and recurring costs.

    Another positive outcome of competition of the screen book has been focus on the future of the paper book. The paper book has not rolled over and played dead. There has been functional clarification of its roles. While displaced from some reference genres, the paper book has accentuated its role in academic monograph as print on demand has extended its reach. Illustrated books for sciences and arts have advanced as they benefit from digital pre-press design and editing. Partextual features refined for paper magazines, newspapers, journals and books have proven variously difficult or impractical to migrate to the screen. These amenities of reader expectations have prompted major reinventions for the screen including, for example, touch-screen navigations. But at the same time print has an advantage of a highly refined “installed base” of book paratext including such almost invisible fundamentals as pagination, recto/verso duplex, and efficient two page spreads.

    Digital technologies have advanced the paper book as much as the networked screen book.

  2. Gary I don’t buy into a lot of what you say, though to be honest I don’t understand a lot of your sentences and language.

    Publishers should be cautious about their ‘innovations’ to paper books. In my view paper books and eBooks are not necessarily direct competitors. Those who have already moved over to eBooks will not really be swayed by changes or innovations to paper books. They have moved.

    Those who may be thinking about moving over to the 21st century medium are unlikely to be easily impressed by a few gimmicks. And if you ask me, adding illustration to a fiction book ? ….. YUK !

    Saying that, innovation is always a good thing and it will be interesting to see what they come up with without ballooning the price. As a reader who reads eBook, but is still open to an odd paper book from time to time I would be attracted by a lighter weight book, something that doesn’t require muscular arms to hold it up and hold it open – for a start.

    As to paper books as art forms I think there is definitely a future for them. However eBooks will have far greater access to higher quality illustrations, zooming, external in depth references and greater length than a paper book can deliver. In my view paper needs to go to paper quality and cover quality, material, embossing, impressing, inlays etc.

  3. Howard, not everybody has “moved over,” in the sense of leaving print books behind. I suggest that, in general, ebook readers are more interested in content than appearance, and thus won’t be tempted by fancy details added to print editions.

    Your reaction to illustrations in fiction is rather strange. But maybe you’re just too young to be aware that it was once fairly common for novels to be illustrated, sometimes by well-known illustrators and artists.

  4. Fiction novels and their magical effect on our imaginations are unique to each of us. When we read a great book we create a world that is the result of a combination of the author’s and our own imaginations.

    The last thing I want is to see someone else’s illustration of how they see the characters, the setting, the world of that story. So whether it was common at some time in the 19th century is meaningless to me. It is a truly ghastly prospect.

    Also did I somewhere suggest that everyone had moved over ? I don’t think so …

  5. Howard, I’m probably older than you are, but I don’t go back to the 19th century. I’ve read many an illustrated novel (and by the way, novels are, by definition, fiction, so “fiction novels” is redundant). You seem to be assuming that the illustrations were a major part of books. They weren’t. Usually, one or two illustrations per chapter was the limit. After all, they did add to the cost of the books. And if they were well done, they added to the book’s appeal.

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