The bad design from 20 years ago, today!
Look at the cover from this “business” pocket guide which was given for free with a Portuguese business newspaper, no words are good enough to describe it…
This would have been bad 20 years ago...
The graphics inside suffer from the same design genius.
Saving some trees
Sheila Williams‘ December 2008 Asimov’s editorial was an interesting one for me. It discussed the story behind the physical sizes of the magazine she’s the current editor of along its history. Why did I find it interesting? Because I’ve never read Asimov’s (or Analog’s) paper editions. I started reading these magazines in 2002, and I’ve always bought the digital versions only, first at eReader.com (back then to read on my Treo 180), and later on Fictionwise.com, when eReader stopped having them available (eReader and Fictionwise have since then become one company). Nowadays, I only buy paper books when they’re not legally available in digital format.
Even within my geekier circle of friends I’m a bit of a rarity, having heard the most passionate defense of classical paper books from some of the people who otherwise use the sharpest of the cutting edge to live and make their living.
The jump to the immateriality of the commerce and enjoyment of other media like music and video has had a much greater acceptance (both legal and otherwise…), even among the non-geek. Does this say something about the people who read books, or just about a mismatch between books and the digital world? From my numerous discussions with dead tree lovers 
, their qualms have some relevance, particularly for non-linear research reading, such as being easier to navigate and annotate the texts. But after all, hasn’t the practice of reading news online and digital correspondence become all but universal? Why not for leisure, linear reading?
The main points for their passion of paper are its physical properties and permanence. The smell, the texture, the physical bulk as a representation of the information contained within. That the book is enjoyable without any hardware beyond the human sight, that it has a instantaneous “boot time”, and no DRM whatsoever.
My stance is different, based on several reasons, starting with the question of elegance: why would you chop down trees, move them to the paper factory, make ink, move everything to the printers, and move all the finished books around again, when the goal of transferring the knowledge from a writer’s mind into your own can be achieved by only pushing electrons and photons around, using the devices you already have? (I currently read my eBooks on my iPod Touch – I don’t find dedicated devices like the Kindle appealing for my needs).
The lack of bulk for me is one of the great advantages, as it allows me to carry in my pocket all the books I’m currently reading without carrying any extra weight (that’s why dedicated reading hardware is not appealing to me). Therefore, I can use any unexpected free time to read a little more, and I can take any books on weekends and vacations without any forethought or hassle. And if you have ever moved from one house to another, you know how heavy all those boxes filled with books are. My reasons aren’t limited to the physical realm, two other reasons are very important: the instant gratification of buying an eBook online and being able to start reading it as soon as the purchase is made; and being able to reference any unknown words on any dictionary loaded into the reading software just by touching the word.
I still haven’t made the switch completely, as many publishers, either for fear of copying or by not thinking there’s enough market for it to be worth the trouble, still don’t have their titles available in digital format.
In the end, I think it’s just another cultural limitation – if you’ve grown up with paper, changing is difficult.
