What is the future of print technology?

[Laer Carroll]

These quotes appeared in another thread.

Other mediums have changed drastically over the last hundred years, not so with books. It's almost embarrassing how far books haven't come and how little they've taken advantage of technology.

The book is highly salable, but low-selling, extremely useful, but low-tech, innately plugged into the culture, yet never the cool kid on the block.

This is misunderstanding of technology, and what is high tech.

What are the earmarks of high technology? Look around the living room or office where you are reading this. Chances are very high that within a few feet of you there are many thousands of printed pieces of paper.

Bookcases are obvious places to look. Even a modest bookcase may have several dozen books, each with several hundred pages. Less obvious places includes little booklets of blank PostIt notes within easy reach on your desk. A sheaf of stamps with self-adhesive backing, with some pretty or patriotic printing on it. Your waste basket, with several pieces of junk mail in it. On a corner of your desk may be a stack of recently red-lined manuscript pages, printed by your cheap-but-good four-year-old laser printer.

Go into your kitchen. There you may find a roll of paper towels, with a quilted embossed surface printed with a pastel design, and thin tough wrapping paper printed with the logo from Taco Bell or McDonald's. In your bathroom is a roll of toilet-paper, and maybe a box of kiddie-Kleenex with Disney characters printed on each square of "kiddie-nose soft" paper.

Go hiking in the high desert, a hundred miles from civilization. Wait. What is this sent rolling across the desert by a hot wind? A tumble weed. And caught up in its briars is a tattered scrap of newspaper.

Print technology has the following hi-tech earmarks. It is cheap. Versatile. Everywhere.

A less obvious earmark is how many layers of tech created it. Got a clue how many layers under gird print technology? At least a hundred. Developed over at least five centuries, likely more.

To mention just one underlying tech, look at binding technology. Some books are stitched together with thread, which has changed many times over the centuries, including today's synthetic thread. Some are held together by glue, a field of chemistry which today is supported by complex theoretical and industrial technology. Many magazines are held together by staples. Flyers and play programs may use (machine-folded) paper held together by friction - which depends on the nature of the paper.

Another way to judge the technical sophistication of a technology is to look at it as a systems engineer does. All systems have subsystems made of hardware, software, and peopleware.

The hardware of the first printing presses included a plate, which was first created by hand as a sculptured object. Later Gutenberg invented the process of creating the plate using movable type. Later still came plates created by photochemical and by laser processes. It is also possible nowadays to print without plates, via laser (dry toner), liquid ink, and ink jet processes, processes which in the last few years are beginning to replace offset presses in large runs.

Printing software refers not to computer software but to standards and practices of the printed material. One of literally myriads of such practices is the use of serif letters and sans-serif letters and when one is better than the other. Another is presenting the material in sentences separated by punctuation marks and paragraphs separated by indenting, line spaces, and by bolding and enlarging the first letter of the first word of the paragraph. Another practice is the use of headlines as titles of articles and sections within articles.

SF writers usually spend a lot of time on the hardware of future or alien cultures and little on software. They rarely get into the most important part of any system, the peopleware. Because people and the PP&S (procedures, practices, and standards) of how they interact drives every system, and systems engineers in technical industries such as myself spend a lot of time designing the peopleware.

The publishing industry, which evolved over centuries, also has its peopleware, evolved by many professionals rather than designed by a few specialists. These include members of such organizations such as Preditors and Editors and Association of Authors' Representatives.

Bottom line: The more advanced the technology, the more invisible it is. And hence this mistaken belief that books have not taken advantage of technical advantages.

 

[Laer Carroll]

What comes next for print technology?

So what comes next for print technology?

POD (print on demand) is barely out of diapers and into toilet training, but already each book can be personalized in some way. You read more about this in a Publishing Trends web site article on the current state of POD.

Currently printing graphics within books have been very limited. They have more often been used in newspapers (starting with woodcuts well over a century ago) and magazines (rotogravure). Graphics are more common in non-fiction books. In fiction they are usually restricted to a few maps at the beginning of the book.

This is not so much a restriction of the printing process. It is more because creating a graphic is itself a very time intensive process requiring a highly trained AND creative professional, either a painter or a photographer. You more often see this in children's books, especially for the very young who can barely read.

Fiction books for adults require less graphic content. We have highly skilled imaginations and well-stocked memories. We need only a few well-chosen words and well-written sentences to create our graphics. So publishers can get away with cheaper paper, nearly as coarse and porous as pulp paper.

However, paper and printing processes are getting cheaper all the time as print publishers improve the already narrow margins between profit and loss. I suspect we'll begin to see more fine-grained black/white/grey graphics in adult fiction books. We may even begin to see color. Before now only glossy coffee-table books could afford color, or the highly competitive magazine and graphic-novel markets.

All that has to do with the pages between the covers. What about the covers? What about the spines?

Nanoengineering used to be a science-fictional topic. No longer. At least since 2001 it has been a profitable and rapidly growing business. It is now possible to embed electronic circuitry in paper. Eventually we will be able to embed a computer in paper - or thousands or eventually millions in paper, all networked and working in both parallel and co-operative processes.

Closer to today we can embed microchips and nanochips in spines. This can be done for RFID (radio-frequency identifier) chips. The virtue of these (versus a bar-code scanner, the process now used) is that they can be read with a wand while the books are on shelves, or in a shipping box. No one has to pick up the books individually to do inventory control. Or price a book when selling it at a counter.

We can also put audio players in spines. You already see a bit of this in children's books. And in holiday cards. In covers themselves we could put a video blurb for the book, where (as in the following Amazon web page) a character from the book Firelight (a pretty redheaded girl) says a few sentences and shoots flame from her mouth. http://www.amazon.com/Firelight-Sophie-Jordan/dp/0061935085/

That's enough for the trees of the future. Time to look at the forest. Or forests. Or ecologies of the art and business of spinning and selling stories. Just remember. New technologies not only compete with older ones. They cooperate. And both gain. It's called synergy.

 

[Laer Carroll]

An example of synergy

Kat mentions a prime example of synergy in another thread.

... books integrated with other things as a multi-media platform. You have the book, and then you have stuff on the web that supports the book, maybe little side webisodes or quizzes or blogs or chat forums or magazines or all of it, or for non-fiction, a combo of printed textbook with online electronic readers and supplementary materials. (My husband is using stuff like this now.) You have the book turned into a webshow, or t.v. show or film. You have the book turned into a video game. And yes, only a tiny percentage of the bigger sellers get that subsidiary rights deal, but it's becoming more and more common, especially as the market gets more and more international.

I'll give you an example -- my daughter got very interested at a younger age in a series of middle school books called Beacon Street Girls, set in Boston. The independent publisher doing the book had a website, where girls could go and take quizzes, ask questions of the main characters, get recipes and tips, chat, play basic games, buy tie-in merchandise, etc. This is becoming more standard an approach in the kids/YA venue (educational and kids are always slightly ahead of adult retail.) A lot of it probably wouldn't be of that much interest to adults. But some of it -- those bells and whistles -- is, but it's with the book, not revamping the form of the book.

The key phrase is "it's with the book, not revamping the form of the book". Authors of text fiction are not doomed by the new technology but given wider scope for their talents.

Another example is the aftermath of the Harry Potter books. They have spawned an entire multimedia empire. And have the print books sales suffered?

Yes. According to Publishers Weekly last year they ONLY sold $10 million worth of them. How sad.

 

[kmtolan]

Imagine a Barnes & Noble in a few decades. It is a smaller store, exuding an ambiance of antiques and roasted coffee. Most of the printed material will be gift cards, lush illustrated (or video) calendars, and yes, books. These books, with leather binders and perhaps even decorative locks, will occupy a display case running the wall. Each tome will be set in purple or red velvet, and select pages will be open to anything from printed pages in high quality paper up to animated scenes. The book will talk to you if you like. You can ask it questions, and automatic updates to the novel's database will be a given. Behind these elaborate binders will be a writer's complete works - if you wish.

Only the best authors (as hyped by the remaining publishing houses) will be in attendance here. Classics intermingled with current popular writers who are the literary rock stars.

No paper backs, though. A kiosk will serve up any POD you wish, or download to your device of choice from a huge library of contemporary writers struggling to be the next star.

My thoughts on the future.

Kerry

 

[KatG]

Bottom line: The more advanced the technology, the more invisible it is. And hence this mistaken belief that books have not taken advantage of technical advantages.

You have a point.

These books, with leather binders and perhaps even decorative locks, will occupy a display case running the wall. Each tome will be set in purple or red velvet, and select pages will be open to anything from printed pages in high quality paper up to animated scenes. The book will talk to you if you like. You can ask it questions, and automatic updates to the novel's database will be a given. Behind these elaborate binders will be a writer's complete works - if you wish.

Very steampunk! I don't know if that's what is actually going to develop, but I like it. It sort of combines I guess what Sparrow and I are talking about. But overall the book as a block of print -- textual or electronic -- I don't think is going to substantially change.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

No paper backs, though. A kiosk will serve up any POD you wish, or download to your device of choice from a huge library of contemporary writers struggling to be the next star.

This encapsulates the problem that might soon be faced by authors. In an ocean of millions of authors unregulated by editors, who do you choose?

 

[kmtolan]

This encapsulates the problem that might soon be faced by authors. In an ocean of millions of authors unregulated by editors, who do you choose?

It is being faced now. Sites such as Smashwords, Authorhouse, and now even distributors (Amazon & Barnes Noble) will take work "as is" with no (to put this in polite terms) "editorial intervention". In short, we are being deluged by stuff that is 95% junk by wannabe authors.

For now, it is buyer beware. The smart reader will look for a publisher's logo, and stick with proven publishers or at least a recognizable author. The other side of that coin is for the many reputable independent e-book publishers to do what they are loath to - create standards of excellence to separate themselves from the onslaught of amateur hour and smack a logo to that effect on their books.

It is only a matter of time before the Big Boys in New York figure this out for themselves and drive the indies into obscurity...again.

Kerry

 

[KatG]

Oh Kerry, I liked your bookstore of the future, but the conspiracy theories about publishers I could do without. As for the delugement of self-published authors, this complaint happens every time self-publishing gets popular. Also, I don't think we'll be seeing paperbacks gone for a long while.

 

[Sparrow]

Imagine a Barnes & Noble in a few decades. It is a smaller store, exuding an ambiance of antiques and roasted coffee. Most of the printed material will be gift cards, lush illustrated (or video) calendars, and yes, books. These books, with leather binders and perhaps even decorative locks, will occupy a display case running the wall. Each tome will be set in purple or red velvet, and select pages will be open to anything from printed pages in high quality paper up to animated scenes. The book will talk to you if you like. You can ask it questions, and automatic updates to the novel's database will be a given. Behind these elaborate binders will be a writer's complete works - if you wish.

My thoughts on the future.

Kerry

As Kat mentions in her post, this is what I'm talking about. I think you hit the nail on the head.
It's perhaps decades in the future, maybe not, but I think those books we all love so much will be transformed into a multimedia experience... some children's books already use this technology to great effect. Yes, they are quite cumbersome and very limited, but they do talk and interact with the reader. Why I like ereaders is because they're a hub for reading material... juice the things up and they become a multimedia machine-- much like our gaming consoles. Imagine a book as a game cassette or a dvd, and would be wirelessly linked to the publisher.

 

[kmtolan]

Oh Kerry, I liked your bookstore of the future, but the conspiracy theories about publishers I could do without. As for the delugement of self-published authors, this complaint happens every time self-publishing gets popular. Also, I don't think we'll be seeing paperbacks gone for a long while.

"Conspiracy theory" is a great buzz word for debunking someone's credibility without the needed expense of actual facts, don't you think? I was talking about business practices. No huddled shadows whispering in darkened rooms, nor anyone petting some mangy white cat while minions cringe. You buy up your competition or simply overwhelm it. Capitalism 101, and it happened in the 1950's with the Indie publishing market. Not theory. History. So what keeps today's corporations from doing this? Altruism?

I also don't believe that the deluge of self-published authors "happens every time". Has it ever before swamped a particular part of the market (e-books) as it currently is doing? Don't believe it has.

Paper backs going extinct? Well, it's a toss-up, but that is half the fun of predicting the future, eh?

All of this is simply my opinion in any case. Still...could be a conspiracy...you never know

Kerry(whirling his black cape about and disappearing)

 

[KatG]

As Kat mentions in her post, this is what I'm talking about. I think you hit the nail on the head.
It's perhaps decades in the future, maybe not, but I think those books we all love so much will be transformed into a multimedia experience... some children's books already use this technology to great effect. Yes, they are quite cumbersome and very limited, but they do talk and interact with the reader. Why I like ereaders is because they're a hub for reading material... juice the things up and they become a multimedia machine-- much like our gaming consoles. Imagine a book as a game cassette or a dvd, and would be wirelessly linked to the publisher.

Or you could just buy the game cassette or dvd tie-in which is put out by the company that has a business rights deal with the publisher and/or the author, like we have now. You can buy those bundled with the books, like we have now.

When my kid was little, we had a whole bunch of electronic books that talked to kids, helped do educational stuff that was interactive with a bar of images that when pressed offered audio add-ons. She liked them but she liked her print books with pictures more and this was pretty common with the kids in her age group. When she was a bit older Leap Pad took the scene which had text and pictures to which you could point to things with a computer pen and get audio as well. The main point of the Leap Pad and its various incarnations is to help interest kids in reading, which it does. It was also handy for some tie-in stuff, such as condensed versions of Magic Treehouse books, Sesame Street, Where's Waldo, etc. It helps sell books. But it isn't replacing books. It's additional, it expands things, as do the website/online games/books combo that we also have in childrens and have had about ten years now or more. Also, having t.v. adaptations of kids picture books into cartoons with tie-in toys, games and such has also done well, but did not take over the children's book market either.

When TSR was coming out with all its D&D stuff in the 1980's, they had a system -- one computer game unit, one role-playing game unit, one-three tie-in novels, coming out every month. And they sold. They bothered with the tie-in print novels because they sold and funneled readers to the games, and vice versa. But they didn't wipe each other out and they didn't, despite massive fears that they would at the time, wipe out other print books. (It was predicted in the media and sometimes in the industry that the entire fiction market would just become tie-ins, that traditional publishers would go out of business in favor of video game companies, etc.) Instead, they funneled readers into SFF, helping fantasy to expand rapidly in the 1980's.

As for e-readers, their primary use is never going to be books and was not intended to be books. Their primary use is for downloading on-line material. They'll help sell books and books will help sell e-readers, but the idea that this is going to cause radical shifts in the book market seems to me to be not based on much more than emotion and greatly overestimates the appeal of books as products even with added bells and whistles -- the same bells and whistles they've been playing with for the last thirty years.

Kerry -- I don't know what else to call it but a conspiracy theory as you routinely announce that the publishers are out to crush self-published authors. Other than pub pros occasionally complaining that editors are so too important when self-publishing is brought up and maybe back and forth barbs with Amazon who keeps trying to treat publishers like self-published authors, publishers don't see self-publishing as a threat and don't care about it. They see it as fodder. If a self-published title does well, particularly in non-fiction, they'll try to do a reprint deal.

In the early days of category SFF, self-publishing of zines was the mainstay of the field and quite normal. Publishers interested in doing SFF bought the zines or authors publishing with them and used it as a finder/sorter source. And in the late 1980's and early 1990's, desktop publishing was toted as the next hot career of the future and there was a lot of print self-publishing, with a lot of companies and more of them getting into bookstores. And there was a lot of media coverage that this sort of self/home publishing was probably going to take over, the publishers would eventually die off, etc. In the late 1990's and early oughts, POD as the early form of retail vendors for e-books was a big deal and still is doing pretty well, though it is still tiny. There was speculation in the media that POD would probably take over and publishers would then die off, etc.

E-books does indeed allow for more magnitude. There are a lot of people who want to write books, more than want to design video games actually, even though more people play video games than read and buy books probably at this point. The allure of being an author still has a strong social status and we are in the Facebook/blog era where people see publishing a book as part of presenting themselves on the Web. But since the vendors selling e-books have no inventory issues, it just depends on how much they want to stock of the self-published titles (which usually depends on how much money they can make off of them.) It's not a threat to anything. You don't have to look at them unless you want to. And the book market is small, the book market for self-published titles even smaller overall.

I'm sorry but the attempt to turn book publishing into Star Wars just doesn't work. Self-published authors, if successful, expand the overall book market through attention getting to books, symbiosis and browsing. If not successful, they have little impact. It's not as sexy as your scenarios, but book publishing is very prosaic.

 

[kmtolan]

Kerry -- I don't know what else to call it but a conspiracy theory as you routinely announce that the publishers are out to crush self-published authors. Other than pub pros occasionally complaining that editors are so too important when self-publishing is brought up and maybe back and forth barbs with Amazon who keeps trying to treat publishers like self-published authors, publishers don't see self-publishing as a threat and don't care about it. They see it as fodder. If a self-published title does well, particularly in non-fiction, they'll try to do a reprint deal.

I agree with you that nobody is waking up, twirling their mustache, and deciding today would be a fine day to crush self-published authors. Who needs to? From a marketing perspective, they are not much of a threat to the Big Six. Doubt that will change. Fodder. Yep. Self published authors are more a threat to e-book publishers due to the amount of poor material flooding the e-book space - especially when Amazon and their ilk get involved.

I routinely (if you consider three or for times this year) voice my concerns about e-book publishers., their authors, and the challenges each face in this industry. Self-published writers are better qualified to speak on behalf of their concerns than I am. Just setting that straight . I leave conspiracies to the cloak-and-dagger set. Most of everything I say about business practices are things I have had direct experience with.

Amazon...wow, is that a twisted issue or what? On one hand, I firmly believe as you apparently do that the publisher has the right to set any price they please. Amazon needed to be taken down a notch. On the other claw, publishers seem determined to shoot themselves in the foot by either windowing their product or charging too much for the e-book copy. It is like they are begging to be pirated. I have no clue how this will all fall out.

Kerry

 

[Laer Carroll]

It's perhaps decades in the future, maybe not, but I think those books we all love so much will be transformed into a multimedia experience.

Perhaps. But before the Harry Potter multimedia empire came the Harry Potter books. And I do not see that changing - ever.

Why? It takes an enormous effort of many people to create even the simplest multimedia story.

I went more into this in the place where discussion of non-paper non-print books belongs.

 

[KatG]

As we've discussed here before, publishers aren't shooting themselves in the foot because there isn't a foot to shoot. This is a transitional stage in a small, developing market and will be for a few more years. Amazon was using an old strategy -- lose huge amounts of money while making it up on earnings for other products (where they get most of their money,) and investment capital to completely undercut prices and control the market as largely as possible for as long as possible (a plan that ended as soon as the iPad was launched.) Which was okay for the building of the on-line selling market of printed books. But e-books are very expensive for publishers to set up and aren't selling enough yet to off-set those costs. (I know people keep trying to claim that they aren't, but the publishers have had to hire staff to manage e-book operations, even when hiring third parties to do actual production. The proof-reading alone that has to be done special for e-books in the different formats on several rounds costs them.) And they can't put all their eggs in one basket, especially as Amazon is also losing its huge advantage on online print selling as well. There was no way that they were going to make money off of e-books in the future if they screwed Barnes & Noble to accommodate Amazon and refused to get in on the iPad. They've had to straddle the business practices between books and electronics/Net for what is still a very tiny slice of pie.

And it's no good whining that customers are going to run off and get pirate copies. The real pirates that they have to worry about will never buy e-books anyway, no matter what the price, and the well-off customers who currently want to complain that they have to pay five bucks more for first-run bestsellers are not a significant loss as new customers for e-books who are perfectly willing to pay the prices are showing up every day. Most of the e-books are still perfectly cheap. If I had a Kindle, I can get Laura Resnick's Unsympathetic Magic and Peter Watts' Blindside for under ten bucks apiece in the Kindle format, as is the case for thousands of books. It's only the first run, high end hardcover bestsellers where there's an issue, and even there, the publishers keep doing free promotions. And Random House BDD -- the biggest publisher -- hasn't even settled on an agency arrangement. But you aren't going to get wholesale discount prices on top end e-books until it's a viable wholesale market and it's not yet. It's a specialized, semi-luxury good and you pay for specialization and you pay to get specialized goods ahead of the pack if you want that, even ones you feel are transitory. (Or you steal them through pirates.)

And no, authors are not going to all go running off and try to be their own publishers, though e-books can be very useful for them in some circumstances. And no one else wants to do the actual publishing part -- as opposed to production or sales. The booksellers don't want to do it, Amazon doesn't want to do it. The electronics companies have no interest in it whatsoever. So all the threats that them publishers better shape up are basically empty. Everything in e-books is going great, getting worked out, not really making published authors much money yet but the prospects are good. There will be much screaming and histrionics but everyone is committed to the long-term prospects.

As for self-published authors, they're being sold a bill of goods about publishers by companies selling them production services and media which is momentarily interested in books because of the iPad. And they're coming into the big Internet market and discovering that readers don't trust them and aren't particularly interested in them and that selling books is actually hard work and usually costs money and time and patience letting readers get to know you. And they get angry. I think they think publishers are like tax collectors. But it's okay that there are a lot of them. There are going to be a lot more companies to help them do the production of their e-books. As Sparrow pointed out, printing companies alone can easily work with publishers or authors.

 

[Ramirez]

I'm a big supporter of using images along with the text to push the novel along. In one of the books I'm working on, I incorporate drawings (with black and red ink that fits the style of the novel) every few paragraphs to help reinforce the visual imagery of the book. It breathes life into the characters where many times long, explanatory paragraphs fall short for those with short attention spans. Just think of how much more entertaining and clear the Dune books would have been if images could have been strewn throughout to support the text. With a digital book, one could have an archive of images the reader could access at any time. Yet an idea like this has less to do with technology and more with a combination of art and text.

As some of you stated before, being able to use digital books that would include an encyclopedia would be a great addition. Many questions the reader would have could be instantly answered, and they might find themselves researching the novel's universe out of curiosity only to get back into the text with a firmer understanding of the world they're reading about.

I've always wanted to incorporate music with text as well. I could record an entire album dedicated to the novel and include it with the book. The digital book could have built in speakers and the entire album just a click away.

Although the concept of digital books is based on technology, I feel everything else relies entirely on the author. If the author is capable of writing, drawing, and recording music, then everything is within their reach. If not, maybe collaboration with other artists could help.

I'm sure many of you have thought these ideas over for years, but how do you feel about it? Do you think it's possible?

 

[KatG]

I not only think it's possible, I think people are already doing it. Not probably as a total e-book yet, but you've got people doing print and having music attached to the book on a website with artwork, etc. And the enhanced e-books are combining print with illustrations and video. And the web comics people -- they just keep coming up with all sorts of multi-tentacle projects. So yeah, I think we'll see a lot of that and a lot of it will be fun, but it won't necessarily be in the print books. It might though -- that idea of a chip in the spine. Quite possibly hardcovers will start coming with a chip in the spine one day that you can then use to access additional e-print and video content on-line.

But the basic novel -- a big block of text -- isn't going to change. It's just going to have ties to many offshoots and connections.

 

[Ramirez]

That's awesome that people are already collaborating music with their novels. I think that if more writers didn't solely consider themselves writers, but instead 'artists' in general, they would be able to accomplish a lot more.

The music, the images, and the novel itself could be considered one piece of art. This would only work if the artist put their all into every aspect and showed enough talent to make it high quality. Not only would they simply write and accompany the writing with music and images, but they would progress the boundaries of every aspect. The writing itself could form a new literary genre, the music could push itself into new musical genres, the images could depict a style unlike any previously done, with a fresh outlook on the mediums used to create the picture.

I think one major limitation in printing is the fact that for the most part, books are still printed solely with black ink. The possibilities of using many colors in the images and colored text to emphasize or stylize certain words, passages, and dialogue would allow the writer to express themselves to a whole new level. I know many authors in the past have incorporated these techniques, but I can only imagine how much publishers dread this type of style.

 

[KatG]

I think one major limitation in printing is the fact that for the most part, books are still printed solely with black ink. The possibilities of using many colors in the images and colored text to emphasize or stylize certain words, passages, and dialogue would allow the writer to express themselves to a whole new level. I know many authors in the past have incorporated these techniques, but I can only imagine how much publishers dread this type of style.

They don't dread it exactly, it's just more expensive to do. And contractually, they get to decide whether to do it or not -- the author is not in charge of production. But unusual illustrated and other projects do get done, by major and smaller publishers. You have the novels with extensive footnotes, such as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the maps of course, cute little graphics they sometimes do, Bantam Spectra did an illustrated hardcover vampire novel Baltimore by artist Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, etc. Quite a number of authors are also musicians -- Charles de Lint, John Levitt, Steven R. Boyett. Joe Abercrombie was a film editor. Audrey Niffenegger is a sculptor and paper artist, and of course Neil Gaiman is in film, radio and a god of comics.

 

[Ramirez]

They don't dread it exactly, it's just more expensive to do. And contractually, they get to decide whether to do it or not -- the author is not in charge of production. But unusual illustrated and other projects do get done, by major and smaller publishers. You have the novels with extensive footnotes, such as Susannah Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, the maps of course, cute little graphics they sometimes do, Bantam Spectra did an illustrated hardcover vampire novel Baltimore by artist Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden, etc. Quite a number of authors are also musicians -- Charles de Lint, John Levitt, Steven R. Boyett. Joe Abercrombie was a film editor. Audrey Niffenegger is a sculptor and paper artist, and of course Neil Gaiman is in film, radio and a god of comics.

I'll look into the above listed. Personally, however, I dread footnotes. They work well in explaining old texts, like The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin, but for fiction it's terribly boring. However, I really dislike Chicago Style in general so I might be biased.

I think that if the reader has a question they should be given a reference encyclopedia to explore it themselves rather than relying solely on footnotes. This way it would be more of an experience, a journey through the world they're reading about. It's like reading an encyclopedia. You might start out reading about the French Revolution for a question but then find yourself curious and start reading into the history of the Gauls.

 

[KatG]

Oh not these footnotes. Clarke's footnotes are satiric, again making use of 19th century literary devices to play in ways both poignant and funny. And if you really don't want to, you don't have to read them. But they're funny, most of them, all about the alternate Victorian England she's created. Some of them offer little story vignettes, others are simply part of the overall narrative style.