From the desk of Mr. Monk

I feel the need to share my evening.

I got home at 7.
Cooked some tea.
Needed a postal tube.
7:30.
Staples shuts at 8.
Drove to Merry Hill.
Got postal tube.
7:50.
Sneaked into Maplin for a AV sender I’ve been eyeing up.
Got told that the remote function doesn’t work with cable.
They weren’t happy I was in at the last minute.
I wasn’t happy it didn’t do as it advertised.
I went home minus an AV sender and worse off in petrol.

The most common way of thinking about digital books is to emulate physical books. Looking at other publishing formats I would conclude that this is the wrong way to think about it. iTunes for example, made it easy to buy one song from an album (the one you really like, maybe a guilty pleasure) and forget obiut the other 11 tracks you really can’t stand.

What is books were published by chapter? You could buy them bit by bit, better value for money; especially if you don’t like the book early on!

At first this sounds stupid but I can think of 2 good uses.

Say you’re studying and you see a book that’s jammed full of information on a broad subject but you only need a section that writes about your specific subject area. You could save a lot of money right?

The second idea is; scheduled chapter releases. The industry wants to revive the excitement it once had… Build hype by releasing single chapters on a weekly basis! It might just give the written word the accessibility that the MTV generation are looking for.

So what with meeting John D. Berry of Microsoft typography fame, I have been thinking over various elements of the topic. I’ll post these thoughts in a drip feed approach.

STRESS! Today has been a day of pure, unadulterated stress.

I have been setting up my exhibition for Typographic Horizons (as well as balancing some web-work). I’m really nervous of its reception. I really didn’t want to come across as some sort of pretentious idiot who thinks he’s amezzin at the infancy of his career. So instead of doing a typo-piece, I’ve done some reflective work under the guise of a set of typo-prints.

Whilst I was back at my old uni today, I met some old faces. I was told of some fantastic success stories from my year group. It sounds like some of my year group are doing really well for themselves. It’s strange hearing about others from my year group because they’ve taken such a different route from the one I’ve chosen.

Ending on a positive note: the poster that I did is going to be used at the event!