This morning at work I was sent to retrieve as many copies as I could of Crain, a magazine that had published an article about the company.
The article was front, center, and large. The graphic displayed a Kindle with great, sharp, teeth attacking and consuming a hardcover book. Although it was a drawing, it may as well have been a photograph, because that is literally what's happening.
Some have advised me not to enter the world of publishing, because it is a dying field. As each new mac invention and digital-portable-whatever gets thrown onto the market, another newspaper, or paperback book gets bulldozed by its modernized counterpart. It's like Fahrenheit 451, without the burning of books, of course.
The ipad is now selling children's books that are interactive and whose pages you physical turn with your hand. Of course, physically turning really means finger gliding across the screen. Our children will be inept page-turners.
In Alice in Wonderland, the clock ticks, the cat talks, and you literally follow Alice through the rabbit hole.
I can't imagine growing up without real books, ruined book covers that I drew on with a crayon, or bindings, tattered and frayed from constant and relentless reading.
The Magic Skates was one of my favorites. The pictures were bright, and I could hold the sweet smelling, shiny pages right up to my nose as my mom read aloud. Can you imagine a parent putting their child to bed with an ipad? How cold.
My mom says that she felt the same way about the transition from records to CD's. She couldn't imagine choosing the modern version and foregoing the aesthetic appeal and bold sound of a record. But it happened. Will it happen to books and newspapers?
I feel like I'm setting myself up for heartbreak. Why enter an industry that is being pruned of all the things I love most? Just the other week, and editor at Open Road yelled at one of the techies because at a publishing company, we have no machines with word processing applications.
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