Comments on: Disposable Ideas

By: Venkat

Venkat — Sun, 30 May 2010 21:57:17 +0000

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.

By: Tim Maly

Tim Maly — Sun, 23 May 2010 03:18:58 +0000

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.

By: Matthew Battles

Matthew Battles — Fri, 21 May 2010 19:59:54 +0000

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.

By: Adam

Adam — Fri, 21 May 2010 16:09:49 +0000

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.

By: kristianlund

kristianlund — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:14:45 +0000

Also related: Conspicuous consumption.