News and views from the Oh yeah, everybody can see it if it's on the Web
Sometimes I forget about that. But I was reminded this week when I got a request from a well-known publisher of non-fiction books for young people. This company is publishing a book about author Orson Scott Card, who wrote Ender's Game and many other wonderful books. In 1998 and 2000 (a million years ago in Internet time), Mr. Card visited our fair city while on book signing tours. Both times, I went with a group of RifRaf (book club) members and later documented the occasions in our photo gallery. So now the publisher is writing to seek permission to publish those photos in the book. Wow.
So some questions come to mind. Are our visits with OSC more immortalized by being published in a hard copy book than they are by being published on a website? Which instance of documentation will live longer -- the online one or the paper one? Which instance will be seen by more people? And why am I thrilled at the thought of those photos seeing hard copy?
So some questions come to mind. Are our visits with OSC more immortalized by being published in a hard copy book than they are by being published on a website? Which instance of documentation will live longer -- the online one or the paper one? Which instance will be seen by more people? And why am I thrilled at the thought of those photos seeing hard copy?
1 Comments:
This certainly raises interesting questions, many of which (I'm sure) have been discussed at some length already elsewhere. But I know that to me, a published, physical object (especially a book, as opposed perhaps to a magazine)is more "real" than an image on a webpage will ever be. So my visceral reaction is that yes, your pictures in a book mean more than pictures on the web.
This, on one level, is completely illogical; it's certainly conceivable that thousands more people may see the images on the web than might in the book; but I believe that we older persons are more inclined to believe in the fact of a book than the evanescence of a web page...what worries me, though, is the idea that we have generations coming up who will consider books as no more than, and perhaps less than, alternate sources of information to web pages. I don't like this thought.
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