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There Will Be Ink (5)

If I were Robert Frank today imagining The Americans ― or Larry Clark working on Tulsa, or W. Eugene Smith and Aileen Smith on Minamata, or Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor on An American Exodus ― I’d do them as ebooks. Indeed, several of them, specifically Minamata and An American Exodus, strike me as prophecies of the ebook, prototype hypertexts straining at the confines of the printed, bound book. […]

Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (5)

Those who reviled me as “misogynistic” in early 2012 for my opposition to such tendencies as cut-rate breast and buttock augmentation will doubtless find further proof of my woman-hating attitude in my celebration of a grass-roots movement known as “The Mom Stays in the Picture,” which arose spontaneously in response to an op-ed piece by Allison Tate at The Huffington Post. […]

There Will Be Ink (4)

I expect the digital component of BookExpo America to expand and the print component thereof to shrink over the coming years. Eventually, I predict, the print-only publishers will huddle in a distant corner, and the digital publishers will rule the floor. For similar reasons, I expect specialized photo-book publishers, and the authors of such works, to move steadily toward ebook format. […]

There Will Be Ink (3)

The compulsory worldwide education for which Malala Yousafzai called in her U.N. speech, though it will surely involve physical books and paper and pens, will rely increasingly on digital tools: computers, the internet, digitized books and periodicals accessed through digital libraries. And I’m convinced that the future of the illustrated book lies in the ebook or some other form of electronic delivery. […]

There Will Be Ink (2)

I can bemoan the erosion of the analog library that I grew up loving as a quasi-sacral space, a physical site that embodied our cultural commitment to preserving our accumulated knowledge as imbedded in words on paper. And, at the same time, watching the children of my community surfing the net in our new postmodern branch library, I can also say, “Just look how beautiful it is. […]