Sunday, May 14, 2017

How real books have trumped ebooks

The title says it all - the popularity of the e-book has slowly diminished since 2014 and the physical book has made a resurgence.  I, myself, have always favoured the physical book - whether hardback, paperback, softcover - over the e-book. I just find them more user-friendly.  I don't have an e-reader, I use my laptop - so for me, holding the book in my hand is more convenient and more conducive to reading.

Here's what Alex Preston has to say on the issue in the Guardian:
Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now, though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and beautiful books are everywhere.
The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’ production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of jewel-like beauty, often with gorgeously textured pages.
Whether the physical book goes the way of the hand-illuminated manuscript, an object of merely historical interest for all its beauty, or whether this ancient piece of technology is here to stay, we should all be celebrating the work of the designers and publishers who have responded to the gauntlet thrown down by ebooks with such aplomb.
We should also recognise that the most beautiful books of the last few years have also been some of the most brilliant and inspired. The care and attention lavished on those intricately illuminated medieval volumes said something important about what was written inside them, the value of the words within, and this is no less true today.

read entire article here @ the Guardian

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