'Deep reading' was the subject of an NPR program that was actually about the devolution of man brought about by the Internet. The phrase caught my attention because I am author wondering about the best way to 'deliver' my book Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée. The conundrum for me is whether to release it as some form of E-book. I had decided not to do that even before I heard that radio show, but the show erased any lingering doubt.
Deep reading promulgates deep thought. Deep thought is something that my book espouses. Huh? Deep thought about giclée prepress? Yes, just that very thing. Deep thought about something you do is its 'Zen'. My book is about the Zen of giclée.
The internet destroys our ability to think deeply by increasing the level of distraction. Lots of information about one thing is replaced by a little information about a lot of things. Attention to any one thing is reduced to mere seconds in many cases, before another comes along or is selected for consideration. More and more time is spent 'surfing' across the 'shallows' of throught. Less time is spent out there in the 'blue water' where deeper currents flow more slowly. Time moves slower the deeper you get too, that's a scientific fact. But back to Zen.
The reality Zen for authors is that people aren't reading as many books these days because everthing is online. There the zeitgeist is rendered in images not words. Take my wife for example. She just taught herself a big chunk of a giant Adobe program by watching online videos. The printed instruction book she bought lay on the shelf unopened. I watched that happen while I was writing my book and believe me when I say it changed my entire direction. It was more like an epiphany in the form of a Zen riddle.
How do you write for those who don't read? The answer is simple, you don't. But it took a long time to realize that because it automatically infers the next riddle: how can an author not write? I really didn't want to put down the pen because I feel a sense of 'duty' to pass along the tips and techniques I've learned in the course of my life as a professional giclée printer. It's why I teach. But how do you teach? Even that is changing, and apparently taking the brain along with it.
It's all about neuroplasticity. Basically that's all about the brain being able to adapt to the environment. As your environment changes your brain adapts by blazing new synapse trails and leaving older learned ones behind. A metaphor to describe the effect is a trail of footsteps in fresh snow. As the trail is used it gets deeper. When it is not used, fresh snow fills it in.
The trails of deep thought lead to great heights and depths but apparently all the distractions of Internet factoids and bites distract us from those paths and keep us in 'the shallows' of thought. You can never really get at the heart of something in the shallows. It's like saying that beauty is more than skin deep. The beauty of the Internet is simplicity and immediacy, a combination which attracts people for biological reasons. Thinking deeply is very new in the evolution of man. The ability to think deeply is actually an aberration 'caused' by Gutenberg and his invention of book-printing back in the 1400's.
Books can grab your attention for long periods of time... the more time you spend with something the deeper you go with it, or so you'd think. But it doesn't always work that way. Before books and even civilization life was more primitive and survival oriented. Life in the jungle is all about 'distractions'. Just watch birds if you doubt that. So it turns out that the Internet learning environment is closer to our primitive roots. Our brains quickly adapt to it, leaving the deep thought paths to disappear. And so it goes for Zen. The Internet is the Anti-Christ for Zen, I concluded.
Once free from that conundrum I was able to get closer to the heart of the matter. Following one's heart is what matters in Zen, which is the 'subject' of the book in a metaphysical sense. The world doesn't need another 'how-to' book. Even though Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée is stuffed with 'how to' there is much more. If you just need a quick 'how to' fix, this is not the book for you. But if you are interested in what lies behind something (and possibly what lies behind that) you'll appreciate the Zen approach I take to learning, teaching and writing.
People teach and learn in many ways. Books. Flash Cards. Videos. Hacking. The list goes on and each facilitates a different type of learning experience influencing what is learned. When books came on the scene so did 'deep reading'. Anyone who has ever read a book that they just couldn't put down knows what deep reading is all about. You become lost in another world... an introspective one. Does that sound like the Internet phenomenon 'Second Life'? It is, sort of. Both are existential. One is deep and the other shallow. When you read, you are entirely within yourself... you are the creator. In the other, you are only a player.
You can't really teach someone until they are ready to learn, at least that has been my experience. When someone needs to know something, they will come and ask me or attend one of my seminars. At those classes I invite people to bring their own pictures, the ones that are giving them the most problems. Then as I prepress them I explain what I am doing and why. This knowledge is readily absorbed because the pump of learning has been primed. Once the flow starts, one thing leads to another in the course of explanation. So a discussion of colors might easily turn into a discussion of pixel density, media type, finishes, etceteras. Many things are thus learned in a 'single' answer because the path was a winding one over hill and dale... not a 'direct connection'. So it goes in my book which is a 'how to' that is 'book-ended' with a lot of 'why'. The information flow is based on 'need to know' (read 'when' to know)... like a grocery store putting the salad dressings and veggies within sight of each other.
On Food and Cooking by Harold Mcgee is a book that made a huge impression on me during my cooking heydays and brief career as a restauranteur. It has absolutely nothing in it that will help you make dinner but if you are into the Zen of cooking Mcgee is your man. The Joy of Cooking will tell you how much mayo to use. Mcgee tells you the chemistry of emulsions and suspensions and how the eggs, oil and lemon combination hangs together. That's finger-lickin' good stuff but not all can stomach it. Most prefer the fast food for thought delivered by the Internet.
After reading Mcgee's book I noticed that my cooking became much more 'creative'. I put down The Joy of Cooking because I didn't need anyone to tell me how many teaspoons of mayo to use. Mcgee taught me what was needed for a 'mayo-style' spread and real mayonnaise was replaced by my own concoctions of exotic oils, ground herbs and edible acids. His way of teaching is what I emulate in my own.
Continuing with the food metaphors, the Internet version of learning is like cooking with prepared ingredients... a can of this and two packets of that. Real cooking is where everything is made from scratch. My wife learned what the tools do, but not really how something should be built. I wouldn't hire an Architect with a degree from Phoenix University to design my house.
If I were to repackage my 272-page book with 477 pictures and charts into bite-sized Internet pieces it wouldn't be the same. If you say that an average blog is about two book pages, the book would equal 136 blogs. But that's trivial. More important, if you read all of those blogs you wouldn't learn as much as if you read the book. The same material absorbed one way works differently than another. Suntan oil is best applied to the skin and not swallowed. That is the Zen of learning.
In the end, I decided to make my own trail instead of following others. Mine leads to...? I don't know the answer to that but I do know the answer to going more traditional routes and the newer 'publish-on-demand' alternatives. Traditional publishing seems like the Titanic (E-books are the iceberg, but they leave me cold) so I investigated the publish-on-demand resources and found that the numbers don't work for a high-quality book. You have to fit into a template and by the time you pay them your book just became too expensive. Either that or if you price according to the market, you're working for Amazon. Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée would end up 1/3 smaller and 1/3 more expensive... even if I used the printer with the lowest bid. That would be an example of function following form, the reverse of the way things should be.
When I lived in Sweden and worked for Saab I learned that 'form follows function' or at least it should. Lars Einar, then Marketing Manager at Saab was my teacher. Lars hired me to design the audiovisual show that would launch the Saab 9000.
The first thing he told me was that Saab wasn't General Motors. The budget was small... very small. Because of that, he said, we would have to 'think smart'. That's another way of staying 'stretch the dollar' or in this case the Kronor. But that's not how he meant it. Lars meant that every aspect of the production should convey sales messages. No viewer time should be spent frivolously. The show must ooze with the specific messages and meanings which drive the Saab brand, or did when he was there. So the show became an 'edutainment' piece rather than something more 'fluffy' and less substantial, albeit on a spectacular scale with an 80-projector slide show and a cast of 50 performers (see pictures below). That is an example of form following function.
Lars today still follows his heart, continuing to live the Zen of motors... now outboard motors in stead of cars and motorcycles. He has published a book about them and runs an outboard motor museum called Museet Akterssnurran in Nykoping, Sweden (www.aktersnurran.se). His writing of Uppfinnarna (Winberg, Sweden) inspired me as I wrote Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée just as the brilliance of his communications strategies for Saab had back in the 1980's when we produced AV spectaculars together for half a decade.
So I applied the 'Einar Principle' to my book and that is how it came to be what it is today. Other books have jobs to do. Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée has a job to do too but it isn't in a rush to do it. Instead of taking the information superhighway, my book avoids even the back roads preferring the path through the woods, where you can enjoy a little Zen along the way. To maximize the book's Zen (and Karma) Pam and I are making each by hand. It's like our grandparents selling home-made jam at the country fair. Sweet.
Publish on demand works in favor of the printing company and marketeers. Both the writer and reader are left with impoverished products and pockets. That's why I ended up following the advice of John Emms. His advice was simple, take the money that would be spent for publish-on-demand printing and buy your own machine... brilliant!
Thus was it decided that we would expand Vashon Island Imaging from a fine arts printing company into a publishing company too. In that way making really nice books became possible and affordable... you know, a book's book, designed to make other books jealous... that was the level of quality I was after, quality to stand the test of time. That's tough for a paperback to do, but not not Giclée Prepress.
Our book is 8.5 X 11 inches (216 X 270mm)... big and beautiful compared to other 'how to' books that max at 8 X 10 inches (203 X 254mm). Giclée Prepress is 272 pages, compared to the 250 allowed by Amazon's Create Space. Our spiral binding is easier to use and will never crack like the bindings of most paperbacks with 'Perfect' bindings (isn't that misnomer a stitch!). The book is full color throughout and printed on Mohawk 80-pound text, which is a superb paper (the book weighs in at more than half a kilo). All that for $49.95. The closest we could come using the lowest bidder for publish-on-demand would be an 8 X 10, 250-page version on way cheaper paper for $69.95. No way.
So Pam and I have taken production into our own hands and the result is hand-made books. Now that's Zen, eh? But it gets even better:
Now I can add 'stimulates deep thought' as a book bonus. After all, it promotes deep thinking by providing the necessary 'deep reading' material, the 'grist for the mill', so to speak. The more time you spend in the depths of a real book like Giclée Prepress - The Art of Giclée the more you'll improve your deep understanding of pixel perfect printing. After all, it was written for those of you who love make great pictures, to help you follow your heart.
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