Dead trees
Posted at 11:21pm on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012 by AndyClaire reads a lot more than me. Claire got a lot more books than me for Christmas. And yet our bed side tables look like this at the moment:
Despite my attachment to “book as object” it’s pretty hard to argue for dead trees when you see that.
Also two of the books I got for Christmas (Perdido Street Station and 1q84) weigh in at about 1,000 pages each. Frankly I find books of this size a bit off putting, to the point that I may not have asked for them if I’d realised they were quite so damn long. And then I saw this tweet from Neal Stephenson (himself author of many 1,000 page plus novels):
When we were doing some work on the future of books for HarperCollins one of the things that really resounded was that novels are 3/4″ thick for a very practical reason; manufacturing. Charlie Stross blogged about this much better than I could, but it’s clear that eBooks are going to revitalise many forms of publishing; short stories, serialisations and epics. Tolkien would have got his way and had Lord Of The Rings published in a single volume if it were published now.
