Wednesday, February 13, 2002

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Douglas Holleley Cornell Professor Offers a Guide to Producing Handsome Books on Home Computers By SCOTT CARLSON Douglas Holleley, an educator and photographer, is the author of Digital Book Design and Publishing, recently released by the Cary Graphic Arts Press of the Rochester Institute of Technology and Mr. Holleley's own press, Clarellen. Mr. Holleley's manual details the ways that modern technologies and software can help aspiring authors or artists produce their own books at home, taking the power that has belonged to publishers for centuries and putting it instead in the hands of the people. Mr. Holleley is currently a visiting professor of art at Cornell University. Q. One of the subjects that you discuss in your book is that digital technology has made the task of producing books easier. What sort of effect do you think this has had on publishing in general? A. It gives the author the ability to follow their thoughts through from conception to bound book on the printed page. This obviously has quite big implications for the publishing practice. At one time, you would have to meet with a bevy of editors, publishers, literary agents -- there is a whole structure of the publishing industry that can now be bypassed. The sticking block is of course the one of distribution. Even then, that is less of an issue than it was years ago in that you can publicize your work on the Web. Now, you're never going to compete with a book chain and it's never going to replace the browsing in a bookstore. But it does mean that a greater number of books can be published without that sort of editorial control. Q. But the Web is a free-for-all publishing environment, and 90 percent of that is rubbish. Did the expense and difficulty of publishing of yesterday cull the weak ideas and the garbage? A. It's still a very time-intensive, laborious task. Unlike the Web, there is still a capital investment. Because we're still developing a tangible, booklike object, there is a reality check. ... When you start printing it out on paper, it very quickly either looks good or looks bad in a way that Web-based information doesn't. There is a whole history of standards always hovering in the background that can really severely criticize you if you do something naive or inappropriate. Q. So the book format lends some seriousness to it. A. I think so. There are plenty of self-published books that aren't well designed or produced, but there are plenty of commercial books that aren't well designed, either. A lot of them are computer textbooks. ... When we invented computers, paradoxically the first thing we had to do is create books to explain to people how to use these computers. And the books that were created were a bit of a departure; they emphasized technique and means rather than address the quality and potential of the media. Q. Aesthetically, what can digital technology do for bookmaking that couldn't be done before? A. Well, I'll tell you what it can't do: What none of these things can do is substitute for a knowledge of type settings or styles, a knowledge of how these have been used in the past, an appreciation of the history of this, and how these can be used on the page. In the book, I tried to remind people that this might be a new way of doing things and one that offers many advantages, but there is nothing intrinsic in the medium that gives you the knowledge about how to apply these things in such a way as to make them look aesthetically pleasant or consistent with hundreds of years of typographical progress and practice. Same with the images: It can't make the pictures for you. Q. Do you have any fear that some of the old skills and technologies might be lost -- like metal typesetting, for example? A. The short answer is, yes. There are different levels of worry. The obvious worry is the disappearance of hot-metal type. But it was disappearing long before we had computers -- offset printing did that. If anything, I think that computers have the ability to make up for some of the losses when photosetting replaced hot-metal typesetting, which is kind of cool. Phototypesetting was mechanical, and unless you were very rich, you had a fairly restricted set of fonts to choose from. The computer allows a typographical diversity that is quite astonishing. Q. So what's the future of the book in a digital age? A. You will never replace the convenience, the access, the beauty, the tactility, the freedom from having to plug something in and turn it on. Everyone thought that when the computer came along this would replace paper, but in fact the opposite has occurred. There has been an explosion of paper. So one of the things that you quickly learn about the computer is that it is a medium that invited speculation because it appears to have so many possibilities. But almost always these speculations prove to be so perversely opposite of what you expect; we can only sit, watch, wonder, and keep our fingers crossed. That's one of the delightful things about it. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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