future of publications design

I, too, love the way it feels to turn a page in an actual, real-life book. But I think it'll be incredibly interesting to see how publications evolve in the digital world. At first, I felt pretty pissed off about it, but now, I'm curious to see what kinds of interesting things we'll be able to do with books. They can take on more of a game-like quality, or they can have interactive illustrations, or you can even do something as simple as looking up the meaning of a word or a reference made in the book easily. The one thing that I hope develops is the technology for making reading on these devices easier. Kindle did it for a little while but then everyone wanted their reading device to be like an iPad so now everything is back to bright screens. I really hate looking at screens for the entire day. I don't want to look at a screen before I fall asleep.

There's a really interesting chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad, where the whole thing is written in presentation-flow chart form. It's a chapter that is set in the future and it is the "writing" of a teenager who does all of her papers for school this way. But the flowcharts are instead about her life at home with her parents and her brother. An amazing amount of subtext can be read into each little chart. It's much more engaging than you think it will be. When I read it, I was thinking how kind of depressing it was that some form of this could be the future of literature, but then I was also so engaged by it, that, at least temporarily, it didn't seem so bad.