Is that a headline of the future? The rumor mill has cranked out enough “what ifs” to come full circle. Ever since Steve jobs announced that no one reads anymore and that publishing is a dead-end market, people have have been picking at him.
But the NY Times’ blog has a post today, not double guessing, but quadruple guessing Jobs and Apple’s plans and wonder if they plan to reinvent book reading the way they reinvented the way people listen to music.
I just saw the theorist has already weighed in on DailyLit, as she has been a subscriber since 2006.
Tomorrow kicks off the 12th year of Small Press Month, highlighting and featuring the smaller fish in the huge ocean of publishing. So let’s hear it for the folks still doing it for the love of it and loving what they sell. Don’t get me wrong, it is still about money and making a living, but there’s something almost perfect about a job that is built around creating and pushing products, you believe in and that you know contribute something to society. It’s about quality… not just appealing to the lowest common denominator.
In So Many Books (which should be required reading for anyone thinking about publishing, Gabriel Zaid notes:
“If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.”
“Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. . . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive”
Take that you multi-national conglomerates! You get the other 11 months… this one belongs to readers and smaller publishers alike.
If you don’t enjoy typography or type geekery discussion, please move along, there’s nothing to see here.
Since the Quills are no more, I am going to spend my “award show tracking energy” to keeping up with the Type Directors Club annual competition. I have to say that I am in 100% agreement with the Superfamily winners this year! Awesome. Though I’m not a fan of the Display category winner, but then display fonts never really rank that high with me. And I am really digging the lowercase ‘y’ of Fondo.
I am, however, going to have to find a way to justify purchasing Tiina, just so I can use the italic face. Mmmmm, mmmm… that is one great slant!
{via ILT}
