Craig Mod makes an interesting case for celebrating the (supposed) demise of “disposable books” — he elaborates at some length a simple distinction between books where the content and form are integral and those where they are independent — and welcoming the IPad as a reading platform. Here’s a sample:

We’re losing the dregs of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Once we dump this weight we can prune our increasingly obsolete network of distribution. As physicality disappears, so too does the need to fly dead trees around the world.

You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everything in that last paragraph were true! Unfortunately, part of this is fiction writing. Check out the NYT bestseller list and see if you can observe “a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.”

To me the most interesting part of Mod’s argument is his vision for booklike content that disposes of the metaphor of the page, as shown in the image above (the image is Mod’s). In this vision the content metaphor is not the bound book but the East Asian handscroll, on which stories were rolled out continuously from one end to the other rather than proceeding page by page.

The book is a perfected technology, but why should the electronic platform inherit the binding metaphor?

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Link: Books in the Age of the IPad

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“Books” in the age of the IPad

The Bookseller is back with another round of odd book titles. This year the six finalists for the Diagram Prize for odd book titles are the following:

• Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
• Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
• Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes
• Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots
• The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease
• What Kind of Bean is This Chihuahua?

As I mentioned before in this context, as the translator of Frozen Coagulated Cultures in Wine, Cheese, and Sauerkraut Production, I fail to see what’s so funny about these titles.

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Odd book titles of 2009

The pages are the same, except that in one spread the main text block is ragged and in the other it is justified. I’m curious which version people prefer.

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Rag or justified?

But it’s not like I haven’t been reading. What’s up with that?

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It seems I haven’t been keeping up

The first post at The Art of American Book Covers, by Richard Minsky, was made on August 26, so this blog is less than a month old. I regret that I don’t remember who directed me to it, but this blog is so rich in knowledge about techniques of book production that it makes me feel like an absolute novice. The blog will apparently focus on fine books of the nineteenth century. The image above is a detail from a book published by L. C. Page, who it seems offered each of their titles in red, white or blue cloth (wow!). Instead of stamping, a white cloth panel was glued onto the red and blue books. Following is a portion of the blog’s commentary related to this detail, but you should check out Minsky’s blog for the full story:

The panel on the 1906 variant is unusual. The white has a blue-ish cast, and blue is showing through the white where it is rubbed; white is showing through the blue where that is rubbed, and white is showing through the gold where rubbed. It appears as though a white cloth onlay was applied to the cover, which was then stamped with blue, then white, and finally with gold. The details show that the cloth for the panel was applied before the stamping, since the blue and gold both overlap the onlay on both variants.

Why would the stamping be done in white if the cloth were white? One possible answer is that by 1906 opaque white inks were available for the stamping that were not prone to flaking and produced a brighter white than the cloth color. That fails to explain why blue would be stamped under the white.

Regarding white stamping on white cloth, when I published Fantastic Tales by I. U. Tarchetti, translated by Larry Venuti, I put black cloth over black boards. My production manager thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. It’s a nice looking book though (the paper jacket is shown; maybe I will take a photo of the cloth cover later on sometime).

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Sites we like: The Art of American Book Covers

Then: Book of Genesis
Now: FLOOD! A true story of heartbreak, heroism, and the will to survive

Then: Moby Dick
Now: Orca Obsession: How the Whaling Industry Is Destroying Our Sea and Sailors

Then: Romeo and Juliet
Now: The Teen Sex and Suicide Epidemic: What You Need to Know to Protect Yourself and Your Family

Then: The Gospel of Matthew
Now: 40 Days and a Mule: How One Man Quit His Job and Became the Boss

And my own contribution:

Then: Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking
Now: Chicken Soup for the Kitchen

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Book titles then and now

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Book vs. Kindle Smackdown

But Rushkoff believes that era is drawing to a close. He writes:

The book business, however, was never a good fit for today’s corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and ’90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing. These conglomerates, from Time Warner to Vivendi, are really just holding companies. They service their shareholders by servicing debt more rapidly than they accrue it. Their businesses are really just the stories they use to garner more investment capital. In order to continue leveraging debt, they need to demonstrate growth. The problem is that media, especially books, can’t offer enough organic growth—people can only read so many books from so many authors.

So begins consolidation. In order to achieve the growth shareholders demand but the businesses can’t supply, corporations embark upon mergers and acquisitions, even though, in the long run, nearly 80% of all mergers and acquisitions fail to create value for either party. The music industry is a prime example. In the 1990s, when Sony could no longer demonstrate growth commensurate with its share price, it bought Columbia Music. At the time, newly invented CDs were selling briskly and at margins higher than vinyl records. This was because baby boomers were replacing their record collections. Once that surge ended, artificial growth turned out to be negative growth. The centralization of recording companies and labels under a few corporate giants, meanwhile, favored the rise of large distributors and retailers and the decline of local, specialized shops. Blame Napster if you must, but the truth is that the retail music industry no longer had anything to offer that the Web couldn’t.

The same thinking led the conglomerates to hone in on publishing. Top-heavy, centralized bureaucracies know how to work with a B&N better than with a Cody’s or a Spring Street Books. And they applied their generic corporate management to a ragtag crew of book nerds, most of whom wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—know a balance sheet if their lives depended on it. Finally, unable to grow as fast as their debt structures demanded, these corporations have resorted to slashing expenses.

Read more of Rushkoff’s argument here.

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Have the past twenty years been an aberration in the history of book publishing?

There are special issues for American designers when working with Southeast Asian subjects. This book demonstrates, I think, how they can be successfully addressed.

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Designing a book on Southeast Asian Art

I’m working on a reprint edition for another publisher of a book originally published by Mercury House sometime in the 1990s. The layout files were on a zip disk — I had to scrounge to find a working zip reader (amazingly, the disk was readable). The files were in an early version of Quark. They used customized Type 1 fonts that had been edited in a font-editing program, and the font files no longer seem readable. Modern substitute fonts cause reflow, with unfortunate page and line breaks. Old style figures, ligatures, and special characters are all problematic. The book incorporates Chinese characters, which back then were difficult to set, so they were outsourced to a specialist in Chinese typesetting; if scans were made before the book went to the print they have been lost.

In short, in just a few years the technology with which this book was produced has been rendered virtually obsolete, leaving the book all but unreadable. Compare that to the print technology that produced the book shown above, which remains perfectly readable after more than a millennium.

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Print vs. electronic technologies

Who says you can’t take it with you? Well, you might have to leave your books behind, but at least you no longer need to be separated from your bookshelves, thanks to William Warren’s “Shelves For Life.”

The shelves are meant to last a lifetime. But they don’t stop there. They keep on going right with you on that final chthonian journey. The shelves are made to your own measurements, and they convert to a coffin upon your demise.

According to Warren, “The aim is to make stronger emotional relationships with our belongings and encourage life-long use.” That’s tongue in cheek, right? Right?

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via Book Patrol

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Buried in Books

I’m sure the number of links is not staggering compared to pages that go viral on places like Digg. Still, the glossary has gotten about 5,000 views over the past five days.

Laura Resnick was thoughful enough to send me an e-mail explaining, “In case no one has already told you, a link to your delightful Publishing Glossary has lately been passed around various private e-lists of professional writers, and we’re enjoying the glossary very much! Thanks for a good laugh.”

Thanks to the writers for sharing the link to my site rather than just ripping off the content. I guess writers are a good group to engage if you’re looking for links, since these days they all have blogs and they are motivated to, well, write. (I’d also guess from this list that writers will always need proofreaders.) The ones who linked back to me seemed a genial and generous lot.

This page first went up back in 2006. It’s gotten a bunch of links over the years, but never such a big flood all at once as this. I’ve made no effort at link-building, so this is what a “natural” wave of links looks like. How would Google distinguish this natural wave of links from the kinds of “artificial” link-building campaigns that they say they discount in their search result rankings?

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Writers reading Right Reading

Ten Speed’s most popular titles include What Color Is Your Parachute and The Moosewood Cookbook. According to a report in the NYT, Ten Speed will retain its editorial staff — Phil Wood will be publisher emeritus — but there will be layoffs in the warehousing and distribution operations. If past experience with such sales is any predictor, for a while the company’s editorial program may seem little changed, but sooner or later it will lose its distinctive character.

Phil Wood says, “I am confident Ten Speed Press, the Company I founded and have owned for almost four decades, will thrive under Random House, whose highly professional people are committed to, and fully understand, publishing.”

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Another independent publishing company bites the dust

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The five rules of book cover design

The second biennial CODEX Book Fair will be held this weekend, February 8-11 in Berkeley. The Codex Foundation promotes the art and craft of the book and strives to increase awareness of the book arts.

For those unable to attend in person, Codex now maintains a blog.

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Codex Book Fair

Over at India, Ink., the redoubtable India is thinking about “what materials and processes and vendors to use to make books that will last a hundred years.”

I think traditional books will survive the digital revolution but that their role will change. They will become luxury items, keepsakes, so whoever still knows how to make the nicest books will win. But I’ll bet that a lot of well-meaning production people don’t even know how to spec well-made books, because all they’ve ever been asked to do at their jobs is make everything cheaper and faster. And as the vendors that excel at quality work die off—Stinehour comes to mind—it will become even more difficult to acquire that kind of experience.

She’s looking for a post or series of posts “that goes from front to back of a high-end book, discussing cover materials and finishes, endsheets, binding, paper, ink, and whatever else distinguishes the truly well made from something that will warp and yellow in twenty years’ time.”

This is a great question, and a big one. I expect it would expose gaps in my own knowledge of the book-making process. I intend to think about it and see what I can come up with. But I’d love to know what others think are the most important factors in producing well-made books. Who wants to weigh in on this?

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What are the components of a well-made book?

That’s the topic of my first column over at ForeWord magazine, where I will be doing a series of four guest posts for their Publishing Insider section this January.

ForeWord is a bimonthly magazine located in Traverse City, Michigan. According to their “about” page, “ForeWord affects the choices of booksellers and librarians across the country who tell millions what to read. Our typical publication reaches an audience of 20,000. We also put the magazine in the hands of agents and editors at larger houses who are looking for leads to bring into their fold from the independent press sector. All told, readership is about 85% librarians, 12% bookstores, 3% publishing professionals … and our parents.”

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What independents can teach corporate publishers

Meanwhile, I’ve agreed to be a reader for this translation award. Books translated in calendar 2008 by writers based anywhere  between Fresno and the Oregon border are eligible. So far these are on my reading list:

• Castellanos Moya, Horacio, Senselessness, translated by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
• Do, Nguyen, and Paul Hoover, eds., trans., Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry (Milkweed)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Odes and Elegies, translated by Nick Hoff (Wesleyan)
• Holderlin, Friedrich, Selected Poems, translated by Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover (Omnidawn)
• Nobuo, Ayukawa, America and Other Poems, translated by Shogo Oketani and Lez Lowitz (Kaya)
• Peri Rossi, Christina, State of Exile, translated by Marylin Buck (City Lights)
• Rodamor, William and Anna Livia, eds., trans., France: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (Whereabouts)
• Rojas, Gonzalo, From the Lightning: Selected Poems, translated by John Oliver Simon (Green Integer)
• Saba, Umberto, Songbook, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan (Yale)
• Talebi, Niloufar, ed., trans., Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians around the World (North Atlantic)
• Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, Camera, translated by Matthew B. Smith (Dalkey Archive)
• Zambra, Alejandro, Bonzai, translated by Carolina de Robertis (Melville House)

This is a pretty strong group of candidates. It makes me feel encouraged about the state of literary book publishing today (but notice all were published by independents or university presses — corporate publishers have abandoned the the kind of publishing that built houses like Knopf).

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Northern California Book Reviewers Translation Award

I’ve had a website since 1994. I’m glad content is being digitized. I love being able to find stuff I don’t have in my own library without even having to leave the house. Sometimes I wonder how we ever even did research before the internet.

But I don’t believe that print is dying.

Here’s more from Rubel:

I want to make a bet with you today. By January 2014 I will wager that in the US almost all forms of tangible media will either be in sharp decline or completely extinct. I am not just talking about print, but all tangible forms of media – newspapers, magazines, books, DVDs, boxed software and video games….

When was the last time you bought a CD? Exactly. For me it was back in 2003. I haven’t purchased a newspaper in at least two years and the number of people who I see toting them on my morning train have declined too. I canceled my last print subscription this month and I am now living 100% “media green.” Also I recently signed up for Safari Books Online and I am liking it a lot, though it’s pricey and their iPhone client needs a lot of work….

Well, I bought a CD last week, and I read two or three newpapers every day, but never mind that. There’s no question there’s been a migration of content from print to digital. Which is fine. Some kinds of print can’t compete with digital and will die out.

But print is not dying — it’s changing. It’s happened before. Consider the history of the book. Books were once luxury products for an elite class. In Asia, where printing with movable metal type was perfected, print was not used as a mass media –  instead, it was a technique of standardization. Massive social change associated with the European Renaissance is what caused print to take off as a form of mass media. Now that phase of print may be drawing to a close.

But the book remains a perfected technology. Gutenberg’s work is still perfectly usable. Try that with software from even twenty years ago. The book is portable, it supports multimedia (words and pictures), it is platform independent, and you can move around in a printed book effortlessly, often finding what you are looking for even faster than you can with electronic search. You can, if you choose to, annotate the text easily.

Moreover, the book’s aesthetic value far surpasses that of digital texts.  I quoted James Gleick recently. It’s an observation worth repeating:

You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.”

Print might be dying to a greater or lesser degree as a mass media product but I would take Rubel’s bet any time. The sociology of print is changing, as it has done before, but books will continue to be made, read, and cherished.

Bet on it.

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UPDATE: Another take, from Book Design Blog

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Is print dying?

6 McSweeney’s Books, San Francisco
store.mcsweeneys.net

Probably best known for the literary journal begun by Dave Eggers in 1998, McSweeney’s also publishes books. Some good literary authors have been published by McSweeney’s, including Michael Chabon, Stephen Dixon, Nick Hornby, William Vollmann, and Lawrence Weschler. I think McSweeney’s was surprised to learn how difficult this kind of publishing is, and I believe they are currently offering many titles at steep discounts. Literary publishers always need and deserve support. (McSweeney’s is out of alpha order because I dropped a publisher whose list did not stand close scrutiny.)

7 Parallax Press, Berkeley
www.parallax.org

Parallax Press publishes one thing, and they publish it well — Buddhist-related titles. They specialize in books by Thich Nhat Hanh, but they have also published Maxine Hong Kingston, the Dalai Lama, the Korean writer Ko Un, and others. I think they are still in the same building — a small old church that people used to call “the church of the book” — that used to house North Point Press back in the 1980s. Shown is Worlds in Harmony by the Dalai Lama.

8 Re/Search, San Francisco
www.researchpubs.com

Re/Search says about itself “RE/Search is a counter-culture enterprise against the status quo/hierarchy which dictates prevailing aesthetics, technology, and everything else which controls our lives — often invisibly. The big goal is to accurately document cultural revolt/innovation wherever it may be found, not only in space but in time. We started in Punk Rock and we continue searching for that provocative “spirit/spark” wherever it manifests itself.” Their books often take off from such subjects as tattoo art, gender issues, punk expression, and pranks and hacks, frequently veering into the oddly fascinating, the disturbing, and the bizzare. Shown is The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids.

9 Stone Bridge Press,Berkeley
www.stonebridge.com

Stone Bridge, under the direction of Peter Goodman, whose lineage includes working for ten years in Japan as an editor for Charles E. Tuttle and Kodansha International, has, over many years, steadily and somewhat quietly amassed a distinguished list of titles on Japan and Japanese culture. Subject areas include language, travel, design, reference, business, popular culture, and literature, both original fiction and in translation. Shown is The Astro Boy Essays by Fred Schodt.

10 Whereabouts Press, Berkeley
www.whereaboutspress.com

Whereabouts Press is run by David Peattie, who was an associate of mine at Mercury House. The press takes its name from the title of a book by Alastair Reid. Whereabouts publishes “travelers’ literary companions” — anthologies of literary writings devoted to popular travel destinations — and other travel-related titles. Among the editors of their anthologies are Peter Bush and Lisa Dillman (Spain), James McElroy (Ireland) C. M. Mayo (Mexico), and Lawrence Venuti (Italy). The literary companions are published in a uniform format, as shown with Amsterdam, edited by by Manfred Wolf.

There is great diversity among Bay Area independent publishers. Which means there should be something for everyone.

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Ten Independent Bay Area Book Publishers, part 2