bowl-o-blau

ebookporn:

There is something to be said for the smell of an old paperback, the familiar way the broken spine always opens to your favorite part, the dogeared creases where you stopped to take a breath from its immersive depths. A physical book over time becomes personalized by it’s owner and marked by the life it has led creating a unique  expression of individual personality.

In the digital book world this element of artifact and fetish is inherent in the devices such as an iPad or Kindle but not in the eBooks themselves. There is an  almost sterile quality to the digital file that has dogged eBooks all along the way influencing everything from perceived value and royalties to editorial quality and functionality. Can we as readers be just as passionate about a Word Document of Catcher in the Rye as we are about a crinkled maroon paperback copy of the same book?

Dominic Basulto tries to address this in a recent post in Futurelab called The Art of Making Emotional Attachments to Digital Objects. 

One idea that a colleague mentioned to me involved the notion of “dynamic weathering” of applications — the more that you use an app, the more that it would appear “weathered” and used. People would know how often you were reading by how “worn” your iPad’s screen looked, for example.

Would an author’s digital signature on your iPad have the same “emotional resonance” as one made with a Sharpie in a First Edition hardcover?

How will Kindles effect your decision to talk to the hot girl across from you on the subway if you can’t see the cover of the book she is reading? (It could be Glenn Beck for gods sake)

Will our mothers keep our favorite childhood books in a box in the attic to pass down to our children or will we pass on our passwords to our iTunes accounts?

Now that machines can pull out of the clouds all the great works of literature ever written we might just have to figure out how to put the soul back into the machines?