Dull Parts: Chip Kidd wants to be the boy with the most cake
The other day on the design website A Brief Message, designer Chip Kidd had a short essay entitled “Notify the Next of Kindle.” In the essay, Kidd disparages Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader by bestowing upon it the usual kind of narrow-minded bibliophile dismissal that culminates with the rather Proulxian declaration that “PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN.” This is, of course, news to all of those people out there who DO ACTUALLY WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. (Not to mention that Kidd doesn’t really seem to comment on the fact that both his words and my words are BEING READ ON A SCREEN RIGHT NOW.)
Anyway, Kidd is obviously a brilliant and talented guy, but he’s coming at this from the point of view of a designer and, dare I say it, he has a chip on his shoulder when it comes to discussing the topic. First of all, here’s how he explains away the success of the iPod: “The reason the iPod took off is that music was never meant to be a ‘thing’ in the first place. It was born as pure sound, and pure sound is what it has returned to.” This is pretty ridiculous. Kidd is failing to realize that, yes, music used to also be objects. In fact, when you think of the elaborate packaging of something like The Beatles White Album, with its embossed gatefold sleeve, fold-out poster and full-size color portraits, it was very much a “physical object,” a “thing.” And yet, after being downgraded to flimsy CD packaging a dozen years ago, it will soon be available as a completely digital download, meaning all you’ll get for your $20 is the music and an invisible package. And it will still be a great record.
So why won’t it be different for books? As Kidd sees it, “Books were always physical objects, and the printed book as a piece of technology has yet to be improved upon.” I completely disagree with this. Books were always physical objects, yes, but that’s because they were, well, books. What Kidd fails to realize is that books have a marrow and a DNA that go far beyond the paper they’re printed on. In fact, as I’ve said many times, the “book” aspect of a book, meaning its physical structure (pages, ink and binding) is always the least interesting thing about a it. (Unless, I guess, you’re a designer.) I mean, the reason Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers is because he’s an amazing storyteller who takes me — through his words — to different and wonderful worlds. And while Kidd’s jackets (on Murakami’s books and others) are nice, they’re just part of the package (think of them as icing on the cake; nice, but not essential). I could read Murakami’s novels with different covers, or plain covers or no covers, or as a series of cocktail napkins, and they would still be chilling and amazing stories. So while Kidd can insist that the Kindle changes nothing, I think he’s dead wrong. And I also think the time for the snobbishness of saying no one wants to read books on a screen, when we live in a digital world and plenty of people do, has got to end.
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Hey, if you made your living putting tassels on buggy whips, you’d rail against Henry Ford too.
I think my favorite example of The Book vs. The Words is Salinger’s entire collection. All of his books are published with nothing but plain white covers with seven little lines of color in the upper right corner. And on top of the obvious adulation, Catcher in the Rye consistently appears in Amazon’s top 100.
There’s a bit of an issue here that a lot of people collect books like trophies. It’s a form of showing off. With a kindle no one can tell what you’re reading or what you’ve read. Maybe they need to put a screen on the other side of the device so that you can show off to everyone that you’re reading War and Peace! You could also print off the front cover and pin it to your wall to show off when people come round to visit!
I agree that Kidd doesn’t have a clue about the functionality of the codex. For example there is a difference between physical formats of all kinds, music or text or visual. The difference is in mediation or how much transaction is needed to deliver the conveyed content. Most physical media now require 3 to 6 mediations or hand-offs before delivery to ears or eyes. The exceptions prove the rule. Live music or theater and the codex come to mind.
What Kidd needs to know is that the codex, like live music or theater is in a class by itself and these peculiar modes are impaired by even a single interfering mediation. So there really isn’t a development path or even a relationship between screen and print relative to codex presentation.
But I am going to get his book.
People everywhere are conflating the physical structure of a book with the information contained within. What I find exciting about the Kindle and future eReaders is their ability to change the limitations imposed upon the information by the medium itself. People have tried to work around the restrictions of the paper and glue format through books like Choose Your Own Adventure, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, but they all seem to be struggling against the ‘book’ format, instead of being enhanced by it.
Might not an eReader with its ability to hyperlink and present dynamic content usher in a new phase in the evolution of the novel? One that might increase the novel’s popularity with the general public? I think of how World of Warcraft gained over 1,000,000 new players in the last six months, all of them drawn by the luscious graphics, epic storylines, and sense of community, and realize that not only is print pretty much dead, but that eReaders might be the novel’s only hope of competing with these new forms of interactive entertainment.
You are missing a critical point. The White Album is a perfect example of the editorial arrangement–the very thought of a “concept album,” being dictated by the time limitations of the physical object of vinyl. Without the technology and function of vinyl, this album would not exist. The music of the White Album was created to be an object. If you subtract the function, the music would be something else entirely. It is far to simplistic to divide it into “packaging” and “content.” The soul cannot exist without the body.
The limitations of printing has also dictated the form of the novel. A book is finite; Decisions MUST be made. Outdated or not-the printed book shows the art of editing. Without the limitations of print, as we see in ALL of blogdom, the art of editing fades. The desire for the physical book isn’t simply a desire for quaint packaging, but a desire for finality.
In full agreement about the need for an end to the debate about whether people want to read on the screen or not. For reasons too long to explain in a comment, I really want to read books on a small, portable electronic device. And I do make my living from book design. E-book readers are not the end of the world for book designers.
Recently I watch bladerunner.
Back then (1982) I was very impressed by it’s view on the future.
While watching it this time I was surprised by the scene where
Harrison Ford reads a newsPAPER.
It was out of place and looked as ridiculous as reading a web-page on paper.
Sure I like books!
Sure I like how they smell!
Sure I like to collect them!
Sure I’m trilled with a good designed jacket!
Sure I work in a bookstore for over 30 years now
(with pleasure I might add)
But most of all I like what’s in them.
The content
I will be as content reading them digital as I was when reading them on paper.
And it will..
- save a lot of paper which is made by a very polluting paper-industry
- take some pressure of the distribution network
- kill overproduction
- change the way we read and write
and it will be good
you can count on it.
andré stikkers
As for finality: I’ve read three books on my Kindle since I got it last week, and as far as I could tell, all three ended.