Wednesday, Jan 2, 2013

BLOGPOST: People tell me “there’s just something about the feel of a book in my hands” when explaining why they don’t want to embrace digital delivery methods. I mean, honestly, of course there’s “something” about holding a book: it’s what we’ve done as human beings for two thousand years. It’s ingrained in our minds as The Way Things Are Done. If it hadn’t been for the Chinese and Gutenberg, we’d be hauling around big slabs of stone and drawing pictures of what we had for lunch. But here’s a wild and crazy idea: What if, in a digital age in which content is suddenly, miraculously, for the first time ever, liberated from the physical constraints of the page (or scroll or folio or whatever), what if in such an amazing time we actually treated content as relevant to its medium? That’s a fancy-pants way of saying this: Maybe content that’s delivered on computer screens, or tablet surfaces, or smartphones, should not necessarily be expected to look and act as if it’s being delivered on a piece of paper.