What E-Books Can Do For Photobooks

Download the E-Book, 21MB
--> e-book reading guide)Driven by increasingly accessible self-publishing technology and a new cultural focus on auteurship, more photobooks are being published today than ever before. Outside photography, we have seen an explosion in books of another kind: e-books. Driven by the mass-adoption of mobile devices and the creation of file formats that work across those devices, the ongoing success of e-book publishing hinges on making books both mobile and flexible. This sometimes means rethinking what a photobook is.

In this talk, "What E-Books Can Do For Photobooks", originally given at the Society for Photographic Education conference in San Francisco (March 22-25, 2012) I looked at the industry dominant e-book formats, and what they can and cannot do, today and into the future, for photography. (Focusing in, of course, on EPUB.) Rather than PowerPoint, I built an e-book for live presentation through an iPad. That e-book is available here for free download and use (21MB). I hope you enjoy it, and, if you're inspired to undertake your own e-book project afterwards, I hope you'll contact me. I'd love to hear about it.

Please Note: This e-book was optimized for iBooks and the iPad presentation and, as it was meant to demonstrate the future of e-books, includes some features not yet readable on other systems.

Tome or tomb?

No other recent publication better epitomizes everything Hol is not trying to do with art books than Phaidon's latest tome, The Art Museum. Two-and-a-half inches thick and weighing in at a reported seventeen-and-a-half pounds, this encyclopedic survey of art is 992 pages long, has more than 3000 images, took ten years for its editors to put together, and retails for $200. I've had a draft of a blog post about the book sitting in the queue for more than two months now, but have found the whole thing too maddening and sad to finish up. 

My issue with the book is spelled out in their own description of the thing as "unrestricted by the constraints of physical space". Think about that for a moment. Think about describing a printed book as unconstrained by physical space.... Of course, they meant unrestricted by the physical space and geographic location of museum buildings and collections (in the Museum Without Walls sense), but it's baffling that they didn't take this idea a step further, to its next logical progression, and bring their "boundless" book online, where it actually could be boundless. To put the extreme amounts of time, effort and money into a project like this that they did, and to come out the other end with a "suitcase full of rocks" is just sad.

That "suitcase full of rocks" quote? Oh, that's from Holland Cotter's review of the book in the New York Times. Of course when the phrase appears in the opening paragraph of Cotter's review, it directly references only the "size and weight" of the book, but by the end of the article it's clear that the statement sums up Cotter's overall opinion of the thing's content and presentation. And for that, I must say, I was grateful. Grateful that I wasn't the only one struggling with the problematic conception and execution of this book. Grateful that even the old guard of the art world wasn't willing to sidle up to the old guard of the art book publishing world and take it lying down. Grateful that he reviewed the book so I didn't have to. I highly recommend you go read it. Not as a put-down of the book itself, but as a call to action for how future projects like this might, and should, go. Here's the insightful and meaty conclusion:

"In a sense, The Art Museum may be most valuable precisely for helping to push the analog-versus-digital-book debate along, and even more for prompting ideas about the need to think about old museums in new ways—ways that it doesn’t itself explore."

Amen.

Beautiful Art (Books)

"Art books are expensive (not accessible), heavy (not mobile), and no one reads them (not social). Our reverence for them is misplaced. Today, a book shouldn’t be beautiful for the way it’s packaged and sold, it should be beautiful for what it says and for the encounters in creates.  Encounters not only with other texts and ideas, but also with people, places and—for the visual art field especially—objects in the real world. I hate art books, but I love art."

This is description of the presentation I'm giving today at the Books in Browsers conference hosted by the Internet Archive, the theme of which this year is "beautiful books". You can download the e-book, or watch the video it live streaming at http://www.toccon.com/live. The e-book is in EPUB format which works on Apple, Nook, Sony, and Kobo readers (sorry, not Kindle) as well as online with the free Ibis Reader or on your desktop with Adobe Digital Editions, also free.

And finally, the funny image at the bottom is a QR code like the one I mention in the presentation. By scanning it with a QR reader on your smartphone, or by simply entering the short URL into your mobile web browser, you'll get the e-book on the presentation. I can't say at this point that it works on every device, QR reading app and mobile browser, but I know at least that on an iPhone you can use this to upload the book directly to iBooks, Stanza or Kobo and start reading instantly. Cool!