Frank Romano: Hi, this is Frank Romano for whattheythink.com. Welcome back. Three articles I read recently are all interrelated. This one says, Printed Books or E-books: What is the Future of Reading? This one says, The Latest Craze, Print Books? And this one, of course, deals with book covers. It says, In the E-book World are Book Covers a Dying Art?
Well, you can see everybody is opining about the book world and I think I can understand why. I was recently on a ship for 105 days with 2400 old people and I could not count the number of kindles and iPads and electronic devices that they were reading on although some people did actually read a printed book. The reason they were using the electronic devices is they were going to away for some period of time so putting a whole batch of books on an electronic device made some sense. But at the same time there is a gigantic library on these large ships and they were reading print books as well.
My feeling is we are going to have this interesting world where people read books electronically and read books in print. By the way, I don’t think they will be exclusively electronic or exclusively print. We are all going to become bi-textual. We are all going to deal with both and the reason is that in some cases you want to buy a print book because you want to save that print book. You want to put it in your library on a shelf or whatever it may be. What are you going to do with the E-book? How will people know that you are smart? Oh, all my books are in here. Want to see the list? No, I don’t want to see the list. When the books are on a shelf it says something about you although some people use books as decorative materials more than anything else.
Will we still have book covers? Yes, because we will still have printed books. I believe that the vast majority of printed books will be done on demand. They will be done one at a time or a handful at a time. In many cases when you order a book the book will be printed for you and it will have a cover and someone will have designed that cover. So the book design world will still exist.
In terms of the latest craze in print books, yes, there are people who still want print books. I still want print books to some extent although there are some things I read in electronic form because I’m probably not going to keep them very long or not refer back to them for some reason.
Then, lastly, what is the future of reading?
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Discussion
By Hal Hinderliter on Nov 07, 2012
Interesting video Frank, as always. Personally, I find audiobooks difficult to listen to, especially if the subject matter is technical. For instance, I can't imagine that people would enjoy my new e-book "Desktop Publishing for Prepress Production" http://amzn.to/WC3FFc if I recorded an audio version of it: And of course, if the reading is done by a voice synthesizer, it would be even less enjoyable (in my opinion).
By Patrick Henry on Nov 08, 2012
One big reason why printed books have a future is that thanks to digital print on demand, all of us now can publish books of our own.
R.R. Bowker recently reported that the number of self-published books produced annually in the U.S. has nearly tripled, growing 287% since 2006, and now tallies more than 235,000 print and “e” titles,
What's more, says Bowker, the 148,424 self-published print books of 2011 represented about 43% of that year’s total traditional print output and contributed to the first significant expansion in print production since 2007.
Mainstream publishers may foresee a threat to the future of the printed book. But, they're not the book market's only publishers anymore.
By max name on Nov 11, 2012
dear frank,
would you know a small-middlesize printery, not in europe, where there is required an expert as a general-,production-manager, or in supervising workflow and quality control ?
esp.with heidelberg equipment, letterpress-offset-finishing.
i am 53 years young, german,
highly experienced in this profession, and wish to move away from cold northeurope.
maybe you have an idea.
thank you
max
By Frank Romano on Nov 11, 2012
Max
If there was a print job somewhere warm, I might take it. Try http://www.printworkers.com
All the best
Frank