Art Books and e-Books

I spend a significant amount of my time at the Carter working with what are broadly referred to as "art books." Be it fielding a reference query, cataloging, or shelving, much of my time is spent with these types of books. They are wonderful to view - high quality images and quality binding and paper. They are, though, quite heavy and ungainly to move - something I recently discovered when helping Jon Frembling with a major shift in the stacks. That said, they do serve an important purpose - they offer high quality reproductions of artworks for those of us that cannot visit (or own) the works of art reproduced in the books. They offer a convenient and personal method by which individuals can study or casually view artworks reproduced in these books. You might think this type of "analog" book will be replaced by, or at least outmoded by, an electronic replacement. Well, an article I read last week by Jim Lewis titled iPad, Meet Your Nemesis : Why art books won't become e-books any time soon points out that this might not be the case at all.



The first strong point made by Mr. Lewis is that electronic devices and media cannot reproduce images to the same resolution that books can. I think this is an absolutely fair point at this time, but it seems to only work if we live in a technology vacuum - that is, if technology ceased improving as time goes on. Of course, we all know this is not true - and we know that the resolution of the electronic devices we use will increase as time goes on. This is something Mr. Lewis acknowledges in the article, pointing out that the iPhone 4 has an incredibly high resolution - 326 ppi. Mr. Lewis acknowledges this here:

Granted, technology has a way of changing very quickly. But computer monitors have stayed pretty much the same for a very long time (and most e-ink devices are, for the time being, monochrome, medium-resolution, and tonally crude). And even in a world in which computer screens are as dense and detailed as well-printed books, looking at photographs on electronic media will be at best misleading, and at worst miserable.

I suppose I just don't understand how this will be a valid point in the future, and how it is a valid point in an article that discusses the preeminence of paper or digital books in a specific format.

Mr. Lewis also points out that color on electronic devices is inconsistent at best. Colors look different on each display, and this leads to difficulty in accurate color reproduction with a digital image. As you can imagine, this presents a myriad of difficulties in art books that have a need for accurate reproductions of artwork. The solution here is some kind of display color calibration - what that might look like, I am not sure.

In the end, I think that cost is a problem for artists publishing art books, and cost is an issue even for publishers. Just look at the small print runs for many art books, and how highly subsidized they are. Jen's copy of Robert Adams' Summer Nights, Walking was heavily subsidized by the Aperture foundation - and that is a book that sells well (to my knowledge). You can only imagine how expensive it might be to produce an accurate, high-quality electronic version of an art book, one certainly more expensive than its print counterpart to produce at the present time. Will the market bear what will be required to take art books (and more broadly reproductions of art objects) into an electronic format?

I feel as though I should close with the question I seem to be asking more and more frequently these days - why is it that this debate must conclude with the dominance of one format over the other - electronic or physical? Why can't we see the middle path here?