Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

At last month’s O’Reilly “Tools of Change” conference, one of the highlights for me — and for most other people, I imagine — was Manolis Kelaidis’s keynote presentation on the morning of the second day. Entitled “bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds,” Kelaidis showed how the future of books doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition with books battling computers for supremacy. Instead, Kelaidis put forth the notion of a truly networked book: a physical product that can wirelessly (and, for the user, effortlessly) communicate with the Web, thus adding to the print sensation instead of eschewing it. His presentation/demonstration was rapturously received (that sounds like an overstatement, but it’s not; I’ve been going to conferences for ten years and I’ve never seen a standing ovation, much less one like that). I introduced myself to Kelaidis after his speech (as did dozens of others), but I also followed up with an e-mail after the conference. When he told me recently he was going to be in New York for a few days, I offered to take him to lunch and interview him, and so last Thursday we met at Manhattan’s Union Square Café for an enjoyable and far-reaching conversation that touched on the sublime nature of design, favorite books, old movies and loud music. He was gracious enough to let me record our talk, and relevant excerpts follow.

Q: Did you do bLink for the TOC conference, or was this something you’d been working on for a long time?

A: No, bLink was my graduation project until last year. And the prototype you saw was actually made last year. Since then I’ve been looking into the business and technology side of things. Trying to see if this can actually be a commercially viable business that would allow me to have the creative freedom working on something I love. So I’ve been going to conferences to see where the technology is going and how I can implement this with my book, and so on. And I have also been working on the patents, of course, which honestly is not something I enjoy doing.

Q: What are you looking for at this point? Is it funds to continue research?

A: I have been a researcher before I started my design career, and what I have learned is that I can do the most effective research by actually working on something concrete. So my aim is actually to do a first publication, a commercial publication. Come up with an idea, and do this.

Q: What was the bLink project born out of? Was it you as a book reader wanting more of an interactive experience?

A: The whole thing started in my last year as an MA student at the Royal College of Art, when I had to decide what I am going to do for my final show, for a final project. You can do anything you want. So everybody was scratching their heads and saying, “What are we going to do?” And at some point I was attending this lecture, and this person mentioned the word “books.” And it just stuck in my head. “Books.” There are so many of them, everybody buys them, everybody loves them, they’re everywhere, they’ve been unchanged for centuries, and yet no industrial designer would ever consider working on a book. Graphic designers, maybe. And there must be something in that.

Q: When you brought up the subject of books, did you find that people were thinking the way that you initially thought? That books are static, and it wouldn’t be an area of interest for most designers and engineers?

A: No, actually. People found it an interesting idea.

Q: Do you consider yourself a booklover?

A: Not necessarily in the sense of reading. I have on my bookshelf many books which I haven’t ever read. I just bought them because I was in a bookshop, and you feel it and you hold it, and I buy it. So even though Tim O’Reilly said that people aren’t interested in the book, they’re interested in the idea, I tend disagree with that. It’s not only me who has books they have never read. I know many people who do the same thing.

Q: But wouldn’t you agree that there’s more utility in reading books than in just holding them?

A: Of course. The intention when I buy it is actually to read it. But many times I don’t actually get around to reading it.

Q: So you’re interested in the material?

A: Yes. First of all, when I look at a bookshelf in a book shop, I’m attracted first visually. By the spine, the cover, whatever. However, what attracts me is not necessarily fancy looking covers — most often I am attracted by what you could consider the archetype of a book: a simple monochromatic hardcover with gold embossed letters or old fashioned paperbacks. Then I pick it up, flip through it — sometimes I like smelling the paper — and of course see what is the content is. And if everything fits together nicely, I buy it. But the first thing looking at the shelf is the visual.

Q: In terms of the O’Reilly conference, what was your reaction to everyone else’s reaction?

A: I was very nervous before it began. Very nervous. The weeks before, leading up to the conference, I wasn’t sleeping much. I was preparing, I was thinking what I wanted to communicate to such an audience. This is my process, basically. I often drive myself on the edge in order to achieve something. It’s not conscious, and it’s not very healthy, but this is how I often do things. Anyway, that morning [of the keynote] I was really nervous, but when I started doing the talk, I think I was on a mental trip somehow because I was watching people’s faces and I was talking, but on the other side of my mind I was thinking different things. It was like two personalities. I could continue talking, no problem, but I was also thinking about other things, which is very interesting to reflect upon now. I had decided to talk about my process leading to the idea, the outcome and my vision for the future. I think I took them through a journey that seems to have captured their imagination.

Q: And then there was that first moment, the first demonstration with the Mona Lisa, that got this round of applause. Did that start to tell you that maybe this would not be your usual presentation?

A: Yes, totally.

Q: And then you finish, and everyone is clapping and standing up. What’s going through both sets of your mind at that point?

A: It’s really difficult to explain. The pressure and the frustrations of the last year that had led up to that point, for me, were really, really tough. And then when people broke out into a standing ovation and everything, it was just overwhelming. And after the Q&A when people came up and started taking pictures and everything, what I did basically was get out. I went across the street and found a Cuban homeless person and smoked a cigar in the park. I was happy, of course, but it was too much.

Q: And how have you been in the weeks since? What’s been the follow-up?

A: It’s been like a journey in Disneyland. I was invited to Foocamp after O’Reilly, which was an amazing experience. After that there were meetings in Silicon Valley and San Francisco and meeting certain people you have read about, but now you discussed with or had dinner with them. Then I was invited to come here [to New York] by the Institute of the Future of the Book, and also had the chance to talk to other people. I have had such an overflow of information that really I need to go back to London, digest it all, reflect on my options and make decisions about how I want to proceed.

Q: After all your thinking about the book and how it hasn’t changed, or how it might change, what do you think — even aside from bLink — is going to happen to books in the next five to ten years?

A: After ten years, they’re still going to be like they are now. I think nothing fundamental regarding people’s reading habits is going to change — perhaps only in education and newspapers. Longer than that, they’re still going to exist, but in specific sectors probably. Some publications will not make sense to print, but others will still make sense to be published as books. And there are many reasons for this. It’s not just emotional, or because they’re popular and people are attached to them. My argument is that they’re very, very functional. And people don’t realize this. It’s a very functional device. Comparing this to a screen, where you scroll up and down, or you push a button and it flips pages, [that’s] much, much more difficult. They are also durable and my aim is to ultimately make the technology of bLink-ed books invisible and as durable as that.

Q: So you think that you’ve created the perfect combination of the two?

A: Not the perfect combination yet, but maybe the most elegant one and something that evokes peoples’ imagination. It is very satisfying that reading people are engaging in discussions about the future of the book inspired by this project. However, I think the future of reading habits cannot be easily foreseen. The future is not monolithic, or a matter of dominance of one medium over the other. Instead it is a matter of co-existence. I want to create a platform for publishing that people can experiment with and come up with their own ideas for how it can be used. I see benefits in both the analogue and digital worlds and my aim is to start creating publications that are conceptually interesting, but also new products based on the book-format that are fun to read and use. My personal motivation lies in combining electronics with text and graphics on paper and solving design problems within the constraints of traditional print and bookbinding.