A book as a collection of characters

• The reason book is in the form of a “collection of letters” is because when the cost of reproduction became cheaper through letterpress printing, it was the “collection of letters” that benefited from the lower cost. As a result, when letterpress printing increased the volume of books in circulation, the “collection of letters” form became the de facto standard, and people assumed that this is what a book was supposed to be.

There is no guarantee that this Legacy format of books is still the best means of knowledge transfer in this day and age.

In Japan, there used to be woodblock printing publishers. https://kobe-maekawa.co.jp/press/archives/3723

modern times

• Color printing is an additional cost compared to two-color black-and-white printing of text, but it is not significant, and color books are normally distributed.
• Digital does not increase distribution costs when illustrations are included.
• Production costs will rise.
  • In the normal flow, the author draws a draft of the illustration, the illustrator finishes it beautifully, the author looks at it and gives feedback for minor corrections, and so on.
  • This is high cost because anchoring on “what the book’s figures should look like” is high.
    • The state in which “the quality is not really needed, but because it is the one we see most often, we assume that we need it.”
    • The author cannot meet that high “assumed demand level” alone, which is why the illustrator’s clean-up phase is necessary.
    • Especially 10 years ago, it was difficult to publish as is because what the author could produce was “hand-drawn pictures taken from photographs” or something like that (low contrast, hard to pull out backgrounds).
    • Now you can write with iPad +Apple Pencil to get clear contrast lines on a homogeneous background.
      • You can draw in path format and output as PDF for later editing.
  • There is room for this to be destructive.
    • In other words, the quality of the diagrams provided is reduced from “illustrator’s clean drawings” to “author’s drawings”.
    • More illustrations can be added by making the illustrations less expensive.
    • If what the market wants is “more illustrated commentary,” then it should sell.

---

This page is auto-translated from /nishio/文字の集まりとしての本 using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.