Post-Artifact Books and Publishing
How does digital affect the writing, distribution and consumption of books?
— Craig Mod
An essay discussing digital's effect on how we produce, distribute and consume content.
We will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.
An obsessive focus on surface makes it harder to see the real transformations happening in publishing.
What are the core systems comprising the future book? What are the tools that need to be built?
As designers we will need to provide the scaffolding for these systems. Interfaces for these tools. Not just as surface, but holistically — understanding the shifting of emotional space, the artifact and our relationship to the text.
How will we surface the myriad data just below the words of digital books in organic, clean and deliberately designed ways? How will we shape the future book?
Available on Amazon Kindle.
All your notes and highlights feed back into the Kindle ecosystem. They're also stored at kindle.amazon.com for later retrieval.
