New Publishing Frontier Lesson #37: DIY or DIE

Doctor Oliver Sacks.
Doctor Oliver Sacks. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Oliver Sacks has a fabulous essay at the back of yesterday’s New York Times Book Review called “Reading the Fine Print.” Everyone who reads needs to check it out. Dr. Sacks, one of this world’s most important thinkers about human consciousness (his most recent book, Hallucinations, is just the tip of the iceberg), bemoans in his essay the demise of large-print books. He acknowledges the end of large-print has come about because e-Books can provide any size type a reader desires, but that’s not good enough for him. Sacks doesn’t want a sterile electronic reading experience, he wants “books with heft, with a bookish smell, as books have had for the last 550 years, a book that I can slip into my pocket or keep with its fellows on my bookshelves where my eye might alight on it at unexpected times.”

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