Saturday, February 05, 2011

Books as Art

I have just got a new Kindle - it is great!

The price has come done significantly since the first reader I bought, and having the 3G connection really makes it much more user-friendly to actually get the books to read. You still can't just think of a book and have it 30 seconds later as a number of books aren't available in the right format yet.

But rather than talking about its features, I wanted to go back to what I was writing about in my post 'As Technology Disappears'. Seth Godin is working with Amazon on something called 'The Domino Project'. As a best-selling author, he is moving away from traditional publishing, and will only be printing a limited number of books. In his post entitled 'The joy of collectibles', he talks of how different it is to think about how you would print a book if you were only doing 400 or a thousand (or fifty).

The reading experience on a Kindle is great, but perhaps books (the ones made from trees) will become more of an art form. The covers don't have to have lots of salesy text on them. The paper can be really high quality. They can be designed to last. If you do your reading electronically and then buy the books you really enjoy, it is like cutting back on corner cafe chocolate so that every now and then you eat Swiss.

Exciting times.



3 comments:

Dhruv Pandya said...

I have the kindle app for the iPad, and it has single-handedly delivered all the value of the iPad in just two weeks.

Stuart said...

I hope this doesn't come across as more self important than I intend, but do you put the exciting times bit at the end to annoy me?

Swart Donkey said...

I stopped putting it there for a while because of you. But it is back, and you are just going to have to suck it up Mr Torr.

When times are no longer exciting, I will stop using it :-)