quinta-feira, maio 18, 2017

"de como a beleza combate o low-cost"

"The digital revolution was expected to kill traditional publishing. But print books are ever more beautifully designed and lovingly cherished The digital revolution was expected to kill traditional publishing.
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Book covers looked very different a decade ago when the appearance of e-readers seemed to flummox a publishing industry reeling from the financial crisis and Amazon’s rampant colonisation of the market. Publishers responded to the threat of digitisation by making physical books that were as grey and forgettable as ebooks. It was an era of flimsy paperbacks and Photoshop covers, the publishers’ lack of confidence manifest in the shonkiness of the objects they were producing.
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But after reaching a peak in 2014, sales of e-readers and ebooks have slowed and hardback sales have surged. 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. As the great American cover designer Peter Mendelsund put it to me, books have “more cloth, more foil, more embossing, page staining, sewn bindings, deckled edges”.
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Independent bookshops are benefiting from beautiful books, too. Mary James, who runs Aldeburgh Books in Suffolk with her husband, John, says business is flourishing. She thinks we’ve now had long enough with both forms of literature to recognise that “the greyness and the blandness of Kindle” can’t compete with a book you can touch and hold: “People can’t remember what they’ve read on Kindle. Because everything looks the same. They say, ‘I’m reading this book but I can’t remember what it’s called or who it’s by.’ With a printed book the physicality and colour and texture lodge in your mind.”"
Outro exemplo de como a arte, de como a diferenciação, de como a beleza combate o low-cost.
"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.
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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."

Trechos retirados de "How real books have trumped ebooks"

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