If you love books, chances are your reading experience is
about more than just reading them.
Even if you read books on an electronic device, you may still feel a special
affinity toward holding a paper book in your hands. For example, you might read
only certain books electronically, saving specific books or favorite authors
for print only. You may enjoy the satisfaction of turning the pages, seeing at
a glance how far you have progressed through the book and how much you have to
go. You might be subtly aware of whether the story is rushing to a conclusion
or will have a sudden complication based on the number of pages you’ve read or
have yet to read. Maybe you even ration yourself so the story doesn’t end
before you are ready. Stop now or just one page more?
Those are feelings that are difficult to replicate electronically.
There is no instant feedback regarding the number of pages left. The pages are
not even consistent from device to device to paper. There is no weight to the
book itself. In fact, there may be no final sense of satisfaction from looking
at the physical object you just mastered—no way to give a special book a place
of prominence on your bookshelf.
As we progress through the stages of adopting a new
technology, we may still be conflicted over what we are purportedly leaving
behind. Tradition or technology? Among those things we seem to be losing is the
sheer beauty of the printed page, the paper, the binding, and the artwork—the
things we call book arts.
When I wrote The
Gutenberg Rubric, I struggled with many of the same feelings. My heroes are
rare book experts, discovering secrets on a printed page that could only have
been hidden by a master craftsman casting lead type, but I am using digital
bits and eBook technology to tell the story. Drs. Keith Drucker and Madeline
Zayne are similarly conflicted. Keith realizes that the very tools he is using
to authenticate printed works and analyze the origin of different inks are akin
to the technologies that are also replacing printing and traditional book arts.
Even Maddie’s library of rare books is a technological wonder where security
cameras provide a constant feed to computers, air quality is measured and
maintained, and the collection is protected by automated systems that make it
almost impregnable.
The beautiful typography, the feel of the paper, the elegant
bindings—these are part of what we love about book arts, and like Keith’s
grandfather, we might sigh at their disappearance; but that doesn’t mean there
is no art in eBooks. eBook arts still need to be explored and expanded upon—developed
into their own unique art instead of blindly copying the printed form.
Gutenberg painstakingly copied the letterforms he saw in the great Bible of
Mainz as he cut the punches and made the molds for his font. Over 260 different
characters were cast to cover the variations in width, abbreviations,
punctuation, and ligatures. Can you imagine the monks looking at the first copy
of the Gutenberg Bible and shaking their heads sadly? “They are all the same.
The letters are so uniform. This is the death of the book.”
But within 10 years of the first printing, the art had begun
to develop. Even the decorative initial caps were being printed with colored
ink. Woodcuts were integrated with the lead type and the very form of what we
call a book changed, shrinking from massive volumes on library tables to the
popular octavo size (about a standard hardcover size today) that could easily
be carried from place to place. We had to abandon former technology (pen and
ink) and let the new technology (movable type) emerge into the art form we love
so much.
The same is necessary with eBooks. We are still in the stage
of trying to duplicate print on e-readers. That effort is doomed to failure.
There are fundamental parameters—not limitations—of the technology that make it
impractical to translate the art we created in print to digital bits. At the
same time, there is a world of new possibilities. Interactivity, film and
animation, audio, multi-media, or any of a dozen other things could be tacked
on to an eBook. What we haven’t done yet, however, is find the unique art of
the digital book.
I’m a bit of a juxtapositionist, myself. I serve on the
board of the Seattle Center for Book Arts and demonstrate letterpress printing
in my talks around the country, yet I hold several patents in on-screen layout
and typography. All my books are available in both print and eBook formats. I’m
looking forward to the future of the book while still holding on to the art of
the past.
And as Keith and Maddie find out in The Gutenberg Rubric, the past may hold surprising secrets that
will affect how we see the future.
Links:
The Gutenberg Rubric:
http://www.gutenbergrubric.com
The Rubricant Blog: http://www.gutenbergrubric.com/blog
Author Central: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004QVVE1S
Author Info:
Nathan Everett
nathan@nwesignatures.com
nathan@nwesignatures.com
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