Books and their disContent(s)
Books and their disContent(s)
Mar 8, 2010
In his recent blog post, former book designer Craig Mod says that the death of disposable books—also known as mass-market paperbacks—is not a loss to be mourned. The publishing industry and its customers would be well-served by the digitizing of these sorts of books. For Mod, “the real value of a book is in what it says (content), not how it says it (format).”
Mod divides all book content into two groups he calls “formless” and “definite.” Books with formless content do not rely on format. Like water, they can be flowed into any sort of container and still be what they are. Novels and most non-fiction are in this group. Books with definite content are exactly the opposite—their value and meaning can’t be separated from their format. Books with text and images (art, photography), or poetry, are in this group. The key difference between these two groups is how content interacts with the page.
Mod argues that formless content has no need of the page and so it is better-served by electronic readers. On the other hand, definite content is enhanced by the limitations and boundaries of the page. It’s too soon to know whether this sort of book will remain on paper pages or move to iPad screens.
Arguably, publishers should be more discriminating of the format assigned to manuscripts. Because ebook readers have become so portable and have screens that are easier to read, ebooks have become a viable format. At this point in the argument, saved resources (less paper production) and reduced waste (fewer throw-away books) are offered as globally beneficial reasons for embracing this technology. This is not so straight-forward when you consider that making these devices also takes an awful lot of resources. The disposal of outmoded Kindles and iPads is potentially a more serious environmental problem than dumping discarded paperbacks in landfills.
I’m also concerned about what will happen to the kinds of books we value as objects. Economies of scale are achieved by volume. Smaller print runs mean more expensive books. If it’s true that these books will never be published in electronic form, they could become even more of a luxury item than they already are—affordable only to a book-buying elite. Does this sound familiar?
There’s another irony here and it has to do with “scrolling.” These days it’s a verb that describes how we progress through “formless content” in a continuous stream until we reach the end. Before there were manuscripts with discrete pages, a “scroll” was a noun whose meaning was a kind of format for content. To users of scrolls, the idea of fragmenting content into a series of rectilinear boundaries was initially considered bizarre. And so, for certain kinds of content, it seems we’ve come full circle.
In the end, perhaps the real issue just comes down to form following function. Which form better communicates an author’s words to a reader? It’s been many centuries since the last pivotal shift from the scroll to the codex. The format we call a book was at first a pagan invention, later adopted by Roman-era Christians for a very practical reason: it was easier to carry the folded pages of forbidden texts concealed in their clothing. The choice now facing publishers is: pixels on a screen or pigment on paper? We still need decades of experience to know where this choice will lead us.
© Sue Niewiarowski