It is becoming a divide, but also, D’Addario believes, a possible future for the printed book as “a luxury object.” As usual, it comes down to economics. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S (Mulholland Books), a novel that uses margin notes and inserted notes to expand on the centerpiece story “Ship of Theseus,” a production that Joshua Rotan, writing for The New Yorker called “The best-looking book I’ve ever seen,” as well as acclaimed modern classic, Chris Ware’s Building Stories (Random House), a box containing 14 different sized booklets, pamphlets, and bound pieces, to be read in the order the reader chooses. Writing for Salon, Daniel D’Addario makes the following proposition: “As ebooks strip down and physical books class up, there’s one reason left to buy the paper kind: beauty.”ĭ’Addario points out that the New York Times reported that the promise of ebooks has largely fallen by the proverbial wayside: “A format that had originally promised all manner of functionalities was now fairly restrained, similar to an actual book – goodbye, public comments on books, multimedia elements and hyperlinks! Hello potential embedded author autographs, just like the signed first edition on your shelf.”īut at the same time, while ebooks are “stripping down to the bare-bones of what is actually book-like,” he makes the case that physical books are becoming “more sumptuous and fetishistic.” Cases in point? J.J. “S” by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst could not have been easily replicated as an ebook.

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