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Tuesday, June 6th, 2006
Posted by Chip Kidd, June 6th, 2006
17 Comments
Filed under: Guests.
Okay, babe-a-leenies, I've got the jump on this one. Technically, it's tomorrow and I'm hereby filing my pointless report on time. Speaking of which, it's 1:15 in the morning. I am defintely more relaxed, having had a terrific midnight meal at one of my favorite haunts, Yakitori Totto, on west 55th street, near 8th ave, on the same block as my office in midtown west Manhattan. This place is amazing, and serves til one — later the rest of the week. You'd swear you were in Tokyo as you order off the byzantine grilled chicken menu (hearts, livers, tails, skin, knee bones, you name it, all grilled to perfection on little wooden skewers). And yes, they offer (wait for it)...chicken sashimi. Seriously. No, I have not yet summoned the courage. Cock-a-fucking-doodle-doo.
So, of course, I remembered the other things I have to do this week, immediately after I posted Monday.
- Design a cover for a play by Cormac McCarthy, entitled Sunset Limited.
- Do same for Kim Deitch's new graphic novel, Alias The Cat, which I am also editing. And which rules.
- Reconfigure my design for the Surprise CD by Paul Simon in order to adapt it to, of all things, vinyl.
This latter is especially tricky and I wonder if I can pull it off in any meaningful way. I'm hoping to stall the Warner Bros Records people for yet another week. Designing the CD package itself was a deeply rewarding experience (Paul was amazingly cool and gracious to work with), but the fact is I had a lot more surfaces to play with concerning a booklet, which I do not have here. There were over 11 images used, one for each song, and I don't see how I can apply them to what amounts to one inner sleeve.
Hmmm.
Perhaps drinking and crying will reveal the answer. We shall see.
I was at the office til after eleven and made major dents in the Garcia and the Almodovar, in case any of you were concerned. They're actually ready to show tomorrow. I like them, but then again that so rarely accounts for much.
In closing, just in case there's a lull in your next dinner party, here's an icebreaker: "Okay everyone, e-books suck and no one reads them. Discuss!" Anyone who'd like to do so here is more than welcome. Come on, peaches, sell me on the new digibooks. I dare you.
Books mentioned in this post
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Chip Kidd: Book One -- Work: 1986-2006
Chip Kidd
I don't know anything about eBooks, but your last sentence has got me humming a song I haven't even thought about since probably 1997:
Millions of peaches
Peaches for me
Millions of peaches
Peaches for free
Certainly most textbooks should be sold as ebooks. I wonder if publishers would be able to justify selling updates & revised editions for $50+ then.
I can't imagine any other advantage for ebooks that would be attractive to me.
Hey, crying and drinking is how I come up with my best work too.
Oh whoops, I'm still on the clock.
Back to work, Antonogurl! (I'm trying to help with the crying. You'll have to wait till five for me to buy you a drink.)
Hey, no offense. But your topic sucks. E-books: bah! Speaking of sucking, I have a little sketch you drew for me (at the request of a friend -- we've never met) of a big, fat, hairy...member of the club. Was wondering if you were ever going to scrap the graphics and throw your towel in the art ring Hmmm...Chip Kidd-Lautrec. Nice? Oui. Better yet, how about Chip Daddy. Bout describes that puppy. Now, was that a self-portrait?
Half the comics I read these days are in digital form.
Sell you on them? If I did, you'd probably just snatch them up from some smaller, struggling e-publisher who needs the money more than you do. I don't think so.
Everybody tell Mr. Fancypants Designer how much e-books suck!
Dirk, I think there's a big difference between Web comics (like, say, Penny Arcade) that are intended to be read online — and which sometimes go on to be published in book form — and eBooks that are (as I understand it) a digital translation of an actual book.
Do you actually read a comic book in digital form, Dirk? And if so — money and "struggling e-publishers" aside — do you find it as satisfying a reading experience as holding an actual comic or graphic novel in your hand?
For those who prize form over function, e-books do, most certainly, suck. But if it's the WORDS that matter to you... How else can you possess a library of the classics for so little cost and in so little space? Some IDEAS are important enough that they come through even without a designer cover.
Chip, I am a huge huge fan of yours. (Just wanted to get that off my chest.)
E-books for literature mostly suck, true. Portable readers for e-books also suck (palm, phones, and I think there is an MS reader, too, right?). In grad school, we talked a lot about the future of books, and here we are 10 years later and they are still not a viable format for the masses.
However, I am a tech writer now by trade, and e-books are great for my books. For fast moving products, production and shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. And users get dismayed if you ship a brand new, bound document for each update. With e-books, you can email a new chapter and the user can insert it in what they already have. Or send out a CD that has interative tutorials and movies with it. Also, when users decide to print out the documents, they can select what they want to print -- not everyone wants everything.
Are these "e-books" the wave of the future envisioned long ago? No. Nor are they great for literature. Remember that Gibson book a few years back that self-destructed when you got to the last page? Yeah, that was fun.
E-books do have a place.
But you weren't talking technical books, now, were you.
Brockman: At the moment, the only way to read many of the more literate or quirky examples of Japanese manga are through digital translations posted online by amateur fans of the form, so yeah, I'm reading a number of longform comics in digital form, and no, I'm not chafing at the process. The reading experience could doubtlessly be enhanced with more portable reading devices, to be sure, but that's just a tech fix -- it'll come soon enough. I'm not wedded to the paper experience, if that's what you're asking.
Dirk: That's a fair response. I would ask, however, if you're actually paying for the comics you read online — because if you're not, you should know that you may be killing your favorite comics.
If I find myself reading past the first volume, I make it a point of going to my local Kinokuniya Japanese bookstore and buying the original tankouban. That said, I dispute the notion that I'm "killing my favorite comics." First, the works in question aren't available in English. Second, the "scanlations underground" is widely credited with expanding the market for manga and building the buzz for titles that later get translated -- indeed, I'm reliably informed by several within the manga-publishing industry that American manga repackagers have used the scanlation scene to determine what they'll publish next.
You can learn more about scanlations in this essay that I wrote for the magazine I edit, The Comics Journal.
hm... I used to have an $80 a week comic-buying habit. But as soon as I went back to school and basically stopped making money, I realized that it was just not sustainable to go drop some serious cash every week at Ye Olde Comic Shoppe. I recently discovered scanned comics, and although as a designer I sometimes cringe at the quality, it's the only way they're accessible to me, other than being a permanent fixture at the comic shop, casually leafing through the titles I used to buy, in the hopes that I can get the gist of the stories before some irate store employee came over and asked me nicely to get the hell out. That being said, I wouldn't mind paying a small fee for them, if they were provided by the publisher.
As for regular books, here's a thought: paper hardcover first editions, for book lovers like me. There's nothing like a good, solid, well-designed (insert Chip Kidd praise here) hardcover. And for people like my ex-girlfriend, who really don't care as long as they get the words (there are other reasons we broke up, but this one rates), electronic mass trades, to get rid of the oh-so-nasty paperback format.
Okay. I'm coming late to the party. Gee, CK, can you get more biased? Ebooks are great. However, to really appreciate ebooks, one must be capable of reading. That appears to exclude you and about 95% of the staff of current publishers. (Yes, yes. I realize it's currently quite popular to hire literate scribes to wander around following the illiterate guru-of-the-day so the gurus' mumblings can be transcribed for other morons to puzzle over.)
IOW, if you can't appreciate being able to stash a dozen of the latest novels onto a memory card, plug said card into a PDA, UMPC or ebook device and conveniently carry that one device everywhere you go - just so you can read anytime you've got nothing better to do - then you really aren't into reading. In which case, why do you write for Powell's?
welll i am reading this book and its not a bad book it sa boring book tell them to work on it better toherwise money down the drain
omggggggg read the book i luv u its the best well u shouldnt sayanything about the ppl who wrote this casue there not a child of God
I like real books and Ebooks are ok, it's how much people try charging for the things that kills me.
Here's a funny ANTI EBOOK video on YouTube, check it out it's worth a laugh or so...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1EOtsusGFU