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!