Can you define this book?

Many years ago I went to the WSG on Main St in Ann Arbor to check out “Beyond Words: A Celebration of Book and Paper Arts”. I was stunned by the variety and complexity of the books in the show and so I stayed for the gallery talk which featured Gene Alloway of Motte and Bailey Booksellers (and also an ex digital librarian), and Ruth Bardenstein, a book artist. The talk was centered around “Is the print book dead” (or at best dying). Barbara Brown started off the conversation with the question, “what constitutes a book?” I immediately had a vision in my mind of a paper book with leather binding that you have to open to read. No sooner did I have that vision that I realized that that idea of a book was extremely limited. I listened while the group began to form an idea of what they thought was encompassed in the term book. A book “has a beginning and an end” and in between it “has sequential communication”. The conversation rolled around to comparing a 2d work of art that you can take in pretty much immediately to a book that takes some time to read, or in the case of some art books, take time to visualize. I put my two cents in by asking whether calligraphic art, where the image is related to the letters and the letterforms can take on a beginning and an end and give “sequential communication” from top to bottom, could be considered a book (just to be fair, I don’t consider our 2d art to be a “book”). We refined the idea by suggesting that a book has a four dimensional aspect. It has height, length, and width along with the fourth dimension being time. So, how does this relate to the the Kindle or the iPad or any of the new technological iterations of electronic communication? Many meet the four dimensional criteria, many do not. OK, so we clearly need to rethink our idea of what a book can be, but does this mean that the printed book is going the way of the Dodo bird? Certainly the book arts will thrive as a form of individual expression within the context of what the discussion group defined as a “book” and I personally feel that as long as you have people that enjoy curling up in a comfy chair next to a fire and reading a communication device made from paper products, you’ll keep the printers in business.

shw