Sifting through the collapse, looking for clues.

Quiet Babylon

Disposable Ideas

Thursday May 20, 2010 by Tim Maly

Sturdy, printed books present the illusion of fact. Weightless, in-the-cloud PDFs present more as fiction.

John Maeda on Twitter

I can’t stop thinking about this. It reminds me of banks. To give the impression of security and longevity, they built in stone (now, they build in expensive real estate). They say: “We are not fly by night. We will be here tomorrow. We built this temple to permanence.”

Of course we know that the paper world is rife with disposable paperbacks and other futuretrash. It turns out it’s pretty cheap to make books. But it’s even cheaper to make a PDF.

I need to think about this more. This seems important.

Related: David Carr’s characterization of 48 HR magazine as “a testament to the proposition that even the most wired cohort of journalists in the country retains a fetish for the printed product” in the article about the recent legal troubles.

 
  • Related: eBook authors often market their wares on pages with faux-solid pictures, complete with thick spine and drop shadow. And then there are those vendors of audio 12-step programs, complete with printed guides. They like to fan out their dozen CDs, any card decks etc.

    Projecting an image of being bigger than you are seems like a standard evolutionary tactic, going back to those puff-up dinosaurs.
  • Books already have a diversely worked-out rhetoric of value & facticity. It's hard for a mass-market paperback to achieve the "illusion of fact." There isn't one kind of printed book. Likewise, the rhetoric of online communication doesn't come in one color.
  • This is true and makes this no less interesting. In particular the signal that comes with a nicer book vs a mass market book. "We are so convinced that this is true that we think it's worth putting all these resources into binding it nicely."

    At TCAF this year, one of the panelists who was a cartoonist talked about how much higher sales were of one of his projects when he migrated from stapled 'zine structure to something with a spine.
  • PDF is a commercial file format, owned by a company, albeit it a ubiquitous format, and "mostly" free.

    Even post-script, a common printer driver language (similar to say, ye old plotter-programs, telling the ink where to go) is a proprietary Adobe language.

    A book is any collection of printed somethings fixed together somehow. The only thing proprietary is that a human must recognize it as a book.

    Maybe books are more future-proof in this way, but then again, there is no corporate division out there dedicated towards improving books as a media format.
  • kristianlund
    Also related: Conspicuous consumption.
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