So goes the crux of McCloud’s post on the matter. The Kindle is profoundly portrait shaped, one page at a time, seemingly ideal for book (and sometime soon, no doubt, comic) reading. Except McCloud points out the following:
“Cinema is wider than it is tall. TV is wider than it is tall. Theater is wider than it is tall. Laptop and desktop monitors are wider than they are tall. In fact, with the advent of widescreen TVs, there’s little difference in the shapes. They’re all around 3×5 or 4×5 range. Wider than tall. All of them.
And print? Well, print is taller than it is wide right? The printed page is the exception to the rule, isn’t it?
Wrong. The default shape of print is not taller than wide. It’s wider than tall just like all the rest, because the default shape of print is two pages side-by-side. And the reason is the same reason as the shape of TV and cinema and theater and surfing and all the rest: because we have two eyes next to each other, not one on top of the other.I don’t even have a Kindle yet, so this isn’t meant as a specific critique of the device. And I’m sure its engineers had solid practical reasons to design the device the way they did. You can even turn it sideways when needed. It just reminded me when I went to Amazon this morning and saw images of the latest, how design principles in the wild can always be adjusted on the fly, but as soon as they’re embedded in hardware, they tend to stick around. For decades in some cases.
So if I could humbly suggest a new cardinal rule of designing anything meant to be read (including webcomics): Step #1, look in a mirror.”
And then many, many people start pointing out in the comments that the mirror just usually happens to be portrait as well.
(McCloud’s simple illustration to point out why the Kindle seems, at least to him, to be the wrong shape.)
But McCloud’s points are quite valid, even if not particularly sound – I’m definitely in the camp that print is primarily a portrait format. And the proof for me is everywhere. A simple experiment should be enough. Pick up the nearest comic, book or magazine and open it up. Both eyes focus clearly and somfortably on just a single, portrait page don’t they?
But McCloud’s words, together with a host of articles and features on the Kindle do function to bring up the issue of the future of the print medium, whether it be books, graphic novels, comics, magazines and newspapers. The Kindle certainly looks the part; sleek, light, very modern lines.
(If you’re wondering what the hell a kindle is – it’s Amazon’s portable electronic reader tablet – see here for the wiki piece on it.)
Personally I really don’t think it will be the print-killer it’s so often touted as. One comparison that’s always made around these things is the death of music hardware and the rise of the digital, ephemeral download. Surely, so the argument goes, reading and music are so similar that all it will take is the right hardware to have us all throwing our books et al away? But it strikes me that music and print are profoundly different experiences. Music is a very immersive thing; a great tune fills the room, surrounds you, lifts you up. Whereas print, whilst just as absorbing, is more of a directed thing. You concentrate on print. It’s focused. The expansive, immersive part of print goes on internally, in the imagination. Plus the physical aspect of the medium is very important, far more so than music. There’s truly nothing in the world like curling up with a good, substantial read.
And there’s the real key: substantial read. I now read many, many things online – all short form work- and I can see Kindle or something similar easily eating into the market for short form print: newspapers will go first, then magazines and eventually, once someone (probably Apple) comes in with a decent colour reader, comics will be absorbed as well.
Because comics as they exist today are no substantial thing. 22 very expensive pages that takes maybe 5 minutes to read. They’re quick and easy things and it’s not going to take that big a leap in technology to see them easily absorbed into some form of electronic reader. But a long form graphic novel or a book – that’s a different matter entirely. The physicality of the form is very important here – that genuine pleasure most people associate with the form of the medium will be a very hard thing to overcome. After all, the book, in one form or another, has been around for many centuries and has a lasting appeal that no form of music delivery medium has ever attained. It’s going to take a lot more than a tablet reader to kill the pleasure of settling down with a series of seperate pages bound together between two covers.
May 9th, 2009 at 12:55 am
I’ve always thought the iPhone/iPod Touch interface (colour, tactile, sexy) was potentially the perfect digital book bar its small screen, so the rumours of a larger version of it being produced excites me tremendously. It would have the potential to be a simultaneous lapbook and Kindle killer. And then Apple would probably start its own online newsagent/book shop to accompany the App Store and iTunes.
This wouldn’t be the death of the physical comic/book/newspaper in the short-term, because the reading public is essentially conservative, but it could seriously widen the comic buying marketplace. How many of us wouldn’t go to or can’t get to a comic shop every Wednesday, but are connected to the internet 24/7? How often have you read a review or seen preview pages for a comic at Newsarama or CBR, and if the option had been there to download the whole comic straight away for a couple of quid, would have done so straight away?
May 9th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
It’s easy to write off the Kindle but I suspect the only real hurdles to its acceptance will be price and content. The actual “getting used to it” will be secondary. At present it may just be too expensive and the range of available material too limited for it to become commonplace. But both of those factors will presumably change over time.
I’m not saying it will replace books completely (I also love to hold dead trees in my hands!) but, if you’re one of those types who tends to take four or five books on holiday to read on the beach, which would you rather carry?
As for McCloud’s idea that the device should be landscape, I can’t help thinking he just wanted to say somethng ludicrous so that the rest of his opinions would stand out among everyone else’s. The longer a line of text is, the harder it becomes for the eye to focus on it. There’s a reason that newspapers don’t use their full width and prefer to divide text into columns!
McCloud, remember, was one of the first advocates of the “infinite canvas” for comics on the web. To this day, there are very few webcomics that have gone down that route and less than a handful which (a) have done so successfully and (b) wouldn’t have been just as effective in a traditional format. If the Kindle has got anything right, I suspect it’s the decision to go portrait!