Monday, January 12, 2004
Print on demand, made easier (unfortunately)
This morning on NPR: Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts
Seems this guy has come up with a new glue strip that makes it easier to print and bind books on demand. On the one hand, I like it that you could conceivably go to Project Gutenberg and download a book and get it bound and printed. Most of PG's stuff really needs pages to turn. Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of ebooks and have a whole library on my PDA. But I have two criteria for ebooks. They have to be entertaining, and they have to be able to be read in short snippets. Short stories are good; so are non-fiction books, which are typically broken up into more of an outline form. Many mystery and science fiction novels work well also, because they're quick reads.
Vintage books rarely fit those criteria. Yes, many of them are extremely entertaining, but they were meant for a different readership: a readership without television, people who were accustomed to sitting for long periods of time and getting lost in a story without getting up and going to the refrigerator, people who weren't reading while waiting in line to see the doctor or to have the oil changed in their car. Modern readers read in word bites, and authors have learned to accommodate us.
That's why for vintage reading, I don't like ebooks. I like the feel of cellophane on a cover, the smell of old paper, the look of pleasant old serif typefaces against a yellowing page. I'd rather spend a quarter at a book sale if I can, or in this case, spend a few dollars and print out any of the old stuff I can (if it's the content only that I'm interested in, and not also the cover art, the edition, etc.) than download an old book for free.
However...
I have a firm belief that books need editors, and cover artists, and book designers. The print-on-demand model takes that away. The inventor they interview in this story talks about how someone with a "really good book" who can't find a publisher can self-publish this way. Frankly, I've read--or tried to read--a number of self-published works, and I believe there's a reason no publisher wanted most of them. Even if they were publishable, a highly publishable work can still benefit from a good editor, as the less-edited-than-the-original re-release of The Stand showed.
And works that were previously edited still need proofreaders for a new edition, to ensure the integrity of the edition and maybe to remove errors that made it into the previous edition. Who's doing that for print-on-demand? PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to do it, but how about works that are scanned to text without that kind of service? And forget about it with self-published books.
Yes, the publishing industry makes a lot of money, and like other creative industries, little of it makes its way into the hands of the creators. But part of that is payment for services rendered to the people who make books more readable, more enjoyable to look at, and more likely to attract the attention of bookstore browsers. You take them out of the equation, and you might as well just put up a blog and call it a novel.
This morning on NPR: Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts
Seems this guy has come up with a new glue strip that makes it easier to print and bind books on demand. On the one hand, I like it that you could conceivably go to Project Gutenberg and download a book and get it bound and printed. Most of PG's stuff really needs pages to turn. Don't get me wrong; I'm a big fan of ebooks and have a whole library on my PDA. But I have two criteria for ebooks. They have to be entertaining, and they have to be able to be read in short snippets. Short stories are good; so are non-fiction books, which are typically broken up into more of an outline form. Many mystery and science fiction novels work well also, because they're quick reads.
Vintage books rarely fit those criteria. Yes, many of them are extremely entertaining, but they were meant for a different readership: a readership without television, people who were accustomed to sitting for long periods of time and getting lost in a story without getting up and going to the refrigerator, people who weren't reading while waiting in line to see the doctor or to have the oil changed in their car. Modern readers read in word bites, and authors have learned to accommodate us.
That's why for vintage reading, I don't like ebooks. I like the feel of cellophane on a cover, the smell of old paper, the look of pleasant old serif typefaces against a yellowing page. I'd rather spend a quarter at a book sale if I can, or in this case, spend a few dollars and print out any of the old stuff I can (if it's the content only that I'm interested in, and not also the cover art, the edition, etc.) than download an old book for free.
However...
I have a firm belief that books need editors, and cover artists, and book designers. The print-on-demand model takes that away. The inventor they interview in this story talks about how someone with a "really good book" who can't find a publisher can self-publish this way. Frankly, I've read--or tried to read--a number of self-published works, and I believe there's a reason no publisher wanted most of them. Even if they were publishable, a highly publishable work can still benefit from a good editor, as the less-edited-than-the-original re-release of The Stand showed.
And works that were previously edited still need proofreaders for a new edition, to ensure the integrity of the edition and maybe to remove errors that made it into the previous edition. Who's doing that for print-on-demand? PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to do it, but how about works that are scanned to text without that kind of service? And forget about it with self-published books.
Yes, the publishing industry makes a lot of money, and like other creative industries, little of it makes its way into the hands of the creators. But part of that is payment for services rendered to the people who make books more readable, more enjoyable to look at, and more likely to attract the attention of bookstore browsers. You take them out of the equation, and you might as well just put up a blog and call it a novel.
permalink posted by The Vintage Reader @ 10:46 AM 
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