posting two days late, apologies, real life intruding and all that
Two months ago I wrote whether print publishing was getting the upper hand in the death-grip struggle with digital content. Since it's such a central conversation to those of us in any kind of content publishing (I'll have more on how print vs. digital directly impacts museums and the art-book field shortly), here's a few more thoughts on the subject:
- Liza Daly, who as much as anyone brings together publishing and software engineering, wrote this excellent Medium post on just what's involved in starting up in digital publishing—the piece is from 2013 but just as pertinent today, considering how many non-Amazon digital pubbers have folded since then. The problem of getting good illustrated pages on a device remains.
French artist Érik Desmazières's 1997 illustration for Jorge Luis Borges's story "The Library of Babel." Can you find your Kindle library?
- Library and internet power thinker Peter Brantley, now at UC-Davis's library and also writing for Publishers Weekly, had this great post, also vintage 2013, about the difficulty in archiving e-content the way we do print.
- More recently, digital publisher Metabook made a book app for John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil last year and is now doing one for Wally Lamb's I'll Take You There. And "Downton Abbey" creator Julian Fellowes is releasing a serialized book app of his next work, "Belgravia". Is this growing audience, or just rearranging deck chairs on the non-Candy-Crush Titanic?
