The iPad & books — a response to Craig Mod
By Dave Jacobson
During our recent absence from Cyberspace (due to an extensive Web relaunch), our former designer and Chin Music Press co-founder Craig Mod (whose book design credits include our titles Kuhaku, Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, Goodbye Madame Butterfly, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, Art Space Tokyo and Curing Japan’s America Addiction) grabbed Internet headlines with his thoughts on “Books in the Age of the iPad.”
Now more than a year since he left the world of books, Craig says he’s ready to dispel with paper, too, except when content requires it.
“For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content.”
Moreover, Craig asserts that the majority of printed material is “formless” – that is, its content that can be reformatted without any harm to its meaning and is therefore, ostensibly, “digital ready.” Only content which embraces and exploits its physicality, “definite content,” should be printed on paper.
We have three main arguments with Craig’s piece.
FIRST, Craig repeats the old saw that the value of a book lies principally in its content. Does he not recall Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message”?
Indeed, contrary to what he says about the primacy of content, his argument boils down to the fact that we should adapt content to fit the new medium of the iPad. No longer are we limited by the convention of booklike pagination, as is the Kindle. The iPad opens up new possibilities for written expression.
SECOND, we don’t believe there’s an inherent difference between “definite content” and “formless content.”
The only difference lies in the creativity of the author, and the vision of the publisher.
Novels, considered “formless content” by Craig, once came with illustrations by the top artists of the day. For a short time in the 19th century, illustrated novels flourished in Great Britain, led by illustrated versions of Charles Dickens classics. But since their brief heyday, most novels and other trade books have been reduced to text on a page, their design component limited to the front cover.
Why? We suspect that most publishers lost interest in designing beautiful books because only cover design had commercial value in helping them sell books in bookstores.
But that is no longer the case.
In the “Age of the iPad” when fewer books are selected or purchased in bookstores, the importance of the front cover is less important (despite the anecdotal evidence cited recently by Motoko Rich in the New York Times).
Rather, online purchasing reinforces the commercial viability of making the whole book artful once again, since online book buyers these days consider much more than just the cover. How often, for instance, do you use Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature when choosing a book?
THIRD, by asserting that only “definite content” deserves to be printed on paper (content which embraces and exploits its physicality), he is saying that mass-market readers, those who don’t have or can’t afford an electronic reader, don’t deserve beautiful books.
Indeed, one reader inferred from Craig’s logic that the only books worth printing are collectors’ editions.
But that’s not fair. Paperbacks can, and should, be beautiful. It’s only the lack of imagination and foresight by publishers that has held them back, making them feel “disposable.”
Craig’s own book, Curing Japan’s America Addiction, is a case in point. A political polemic, it would likely be considered “formless content,” in Craig’s current terminology. But his newspaper-like typographical boldness made what could have been an ordinary current events book, soon forgotten, shine.
[In passing, we should note that we recently sold Craig the rights to our sold-out title Art Space Tokyo (a title in which he was involved in the editorial, design and publishing) and that he is attempting to republish it in both hardcover and iPad editions (you can support that effort here). We wish him well in that endeavor.]
Tags: books, ipad, publishing
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