Oh Beautiful Book

In the digital era, books aren’t so much being threatened as they are being forced to reinvent themselves. This is something we’ve been saying for quite some time. In the Irish Times, Danielle Ryan says it again and says it differently and with emphasis:

Books now need to be well produced, beautiful, covetable and visual, and with an attention to detail; they must be possessions the consumer will want to display proudly. Although we cannot divorce the book entirely from the act of reading, we can acknowledge that it is an object and a product and remains separate from its digital cousins.

Ryan is putting her money where her mouth is and has recently launched Roads Publishing in Dublin with a line of high end, luxurious classics because, “advances in technology mean that readers, quite rightly, will turn their noses up at poorly produced books, with sloppy editing, cheap paper and cliched covers, when they compare the price tag with that of the digital version.”