What's the potential for art e-books?

[Liz Richards]

With new developments in e-readers capable of displaying books in full colour and very high quality, and more and more publishers branching out into e-books, do you think art publishers should do the same? I'm studying for a Masters in Publishing at University College London and am working part-time at a creative arts book publisher, and I'm writing my dissertation on the future of the illustrated book with regard to e-publishing. Any thoughts on this subject would be very welcome - perhaps you are an art student who's used e-textbooks, or you're a publisher who is experimenting with art e-books at the moment, or maybe you just have strong opinions on the subject, I'd really like to hear them! There are a number of issues such as picture quality, people's attachment to the printed book as a work of art in itself, and cost - whether there is a good business model to make art e-books work. I hope you might be able to shed some light on these topics. Thanks for your help!

[Robert Heather]

I am not sure that this fits the category - but it does show the potential for re-imagining some books on the ipad - watch this video.

[Pickaxe Publishing]

Isn't a Blog already a kind of electronic book?

Talking to writer's at a panel discussion in Newcastle NSW recently, they talk about Blogs being another site of publication and validation for their work. Isn't this already a form of eBook? or are you more talking about framing Book design with electronic devices?

A group I work with have collectively inserted their artistic practices into a Publishing House and we have a range of output from traditional books, we are using blogs and are willing to distribute using PDFs and later apps if people want them, but we find the Blog and Book to be sufficient at the moment. Have a look at our work on http://rhubarbrhubarbrhubarb.wordpress.com. This is an online artist's book which is using the readymade form of a Blog. We are developing printed books from this at the moment, but they will not be facsimiles of the Blog, but a development of.

 

We (Pickaxe Publishing) will be publishing a dissertation on how electronic forms of "Book" or publishing work with/together/around the book. I'll get in touch when we do, some of it covers the question you have asked,

 

In the end, I don't think electronic forms equate "Book", I think they are their own form of publishing and should be treated thus, not be an equivalent value. They can do more than a book, and less than a book. They're just different. I think they open opportunites to work with books to take the content & experience to new levels, create an expended universe of each work through making it multi-modal.

Just my 2 cents.

 

A.