A bit late

On getting rid of those pesky Word docs*

I’m having a conversation with 1pgbk about the future of books, and art books in particular. We’re already at three reblogs, and I can’t figure out how to Tumblrize a conversation, so I have started a new post in response to his last.

1. There was a quote going around recently (sorry, no attribution) about the growing divide of ebook publishing. Summed up: single writers can go it independent of a publisher, while design/production studios are approaching indie film budgets with a cast equally as large. Kindle singles on the one end, possibly Moonbot Studios on the other. A lot will have to do with scale and reach, not unlike film budgets.

This makes complete sense to me, and is about where I am now. I have my blog and my Twitter and my Tumblr, and I am paid a small sum only for the first. As long as I can keep my costs minimal and write fast, this works. But that means: most blog posts can’t require travel, even to Manhattan; a blog post must take no longer than half a work day; if I can write a post about an article someone else paid me for, so much the better. I’m about to start working on the equivalent of a Kindle single and I am following the same plan: minimally budgeted travel; minimal writing time; hope to use the text twice. And no photos, except the ones that I take with my iPhone. In a way this harks back to one of my writing heroes, Lewis Mumford, who wrote 5000 word architecture reviews without a single illustration.

3. In the instance of books becoming multimedia, we’re going to need writers that are truly collaborative. Far too many books today are written as Word docs, with no consideration of images (or subjective typography). This may simply be an issue of faults in publishing workflows in today’s industry, but to create a digital native “book” will likely require design considerations. We may need writers who act more like script writers, or we may need writers who just recognize that images, multimedia, and design are equal parts with the text in forming a narrative. What would McLuhan’s Medium be without Fiore’s contributions?

This is really no problem for most design writers. Aren’t we all already thinking in slideshows? The illustrated multi-media book is really just a slideshow with higher production values. But this is where it would help to be a writer with digital design skills, or to have friends with the right skills. Which brings me to:

4. I don’t think we’ll escape the issue of rights, especially in the case of art books. But that’s not to say a different form of omnimediated books, magazines, or maybe some-form-yet-to-be-invented won’t exist that can escape these binds. Collaborations between photographers, illustrators, designers, writers, musicians—direct collaborations may be an end-around to the issue of rights.

Direct collaborations of this sort will still need a new funding model. A five-way split on royalties? No one gets paid up front? Everything Kickstarter (nightmare)? I see a lot of photo books already headed this way, with the photographer and writer teaming up and creating the whole package together, then selling it to a publisher. But there still needs to be seed money, and it doesn’t address the problem of historical work.

5. Art books specifically, but other focuses additionally, could benefit from some post-artifact thinking (see Craig Mod’s Post-Artifact book). The “book as software” means a book can be shared, expanded, contracted, or split (imagine an art book that spends on images incrementally—accepting payments to pay the way for future editions and rewarding early adopters with updated books). Here we need writers who can create iterative arguments, plan for obsolescence or upgrades. There are whole secondary markets that books can use to economic advantage that were not previously available to the artifacted book (and no, not just advertisements). Let’s not forget paper costs, printing costs, and warehouse costs as hinderances of the printed book.

I recently priced printing a book in China, and I was shocked by how cheap it was. Could I store 1000 books in my basement? Probably. But the iterative book is a great idea: I’ve often critiqued the first monographs on designers as fine (like this one on Harry Weese), but there’s a more interesting book waiting to be written. Problem is, once a book has been written about a designer, publishers are gun shy. So we need piggyback books: someone writes the dutiful-but-dull biography, someone else adds an essay, someone else adds a critique, and each party uncovers and adds on the relevant illustrated material. The books don’t compete but grow. Or those who can, pay for photographs, and those who can’t, write texts. Here I’m thinking of Alexander Girard. Todd Oldham is about to come out with a $200 lavishly illustrated book on Girard that I can’t wait to see. But I have my own thoughts on Girard, and I would love it if I could annex some of the material Oldham could afford to publish. If the pictures are in another book (and eventually online), could I just cite someone else’s bookmarks. The revival of interest in postmodernism also suggests a zone for iterative critique: we should all re-read that material, and glom on.