Google Lit Trips (see my last post) — a lovely integration of books and technology — is just the most recent effort I’ve seen concerning this topic. I’ve been thinking a lot about books and technology over the past couple of months, looking at presentations from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing ’09 and listening to podcasts from South by Southwest ’09 (couldn’t afford to attend either one).
One interesting thing I’ve discovered is that I always end up thinking about the actual object: the book. Not the content, which can be displayed and dispersed in a myriad of ways, but the physical object consisting of print and paper.
So I was pleased to find this exhibit at the University of Central Florida Art Gallery which looks at books as dimensional objects with print, within which a narrative unfolds. “If reading can include visual and semantic aspects,” it asks, “then precisely what ratio determines when a sculpture becomes a book or when it functions as a sculpture alluding to books?”
I must admit that I find the physical presence of a book — its dust jacket, weight, dimensions, paper quality, font, margins — important and often extremely pleasing. But then I am also quite partial to sculpture as an art form. Are the two connected? Or is my pleasure merely due to the fact that I’m accustomed to the book’s physical form as a part of the reading experience? Is then reading as joyful if this aspect is stripped away?
Which sweeps me back around the circle to technology. Are electronic reading devices the wave of the future? Is it as delicious to read fiction on a screen rather than on paper? That’s hard to imagine.
LINKS:
- TypeBound
