I love books as a channel to teach photography. Exhibitions are fine, but they confine us to a specific space/time. The multimedia mix, which always ends up as a video, is interesting but forces the viewer into a rhythm, and although I find it very appealing, it hasn’t fully convinced me. That’s why, since we started the Arrinconado project in Barcelona Photobloggers, I’ve been researching and testing print‑on‑demand systems and now eBooks.
«22» was born as a limited‑edition author book of 11 copies, at least for now. I don’t believe in limited editions, but given the nature of the project it cannot be reproduced en masse as an object. It must be printed on recycled paper by an office colour laser printer, otherwise its spirit is broken.
With the new appearance of Lulu.com’s aggregation services on the iBookstore, I have been encouraged to create a version of “22” specifically designed for iPad/iPhone.
eBooks are a “new” thing for photography and have serious limitations. A standard eBook, by definition, has no “layout”, which means we never know how the content will be displayed on the reader device. In April of this year Apple adopted a variant of the standard for its iBooks that allows the designer to decide where and how the elements will appear on the screen. After seeing many eBooks I decided that the only way I want to assemble them is with this variant.
For now, I have created the version in Spanish, free to download, and the version in English, with a price to enter the iBookstore. Aggregation services are not the perfect solution, but they give me the opportunity to experiment with the format without the complications of being an official Apple editor. The main problem is that I cannot send the Spanish version to the iBookstore from Lulu.
This is just the beginning. I hope to edit more content in eBooks soon 🙂