A book report — a look at the content

This is part of a series about my experiences in publishing a book. The series starts here.

Here is a copy of the book in electronic form. Since so much of the book is setup with the image content spanning pages, I’m showing you double page spreads. I am quite surprised at how much the effect of the physical book is diminished by viewing it on screen, even with Acrobat set to full-screen mode. That’s not to say that the color is much worse on the screen.  It’s not better, in spite of the greater gamut available on-screen, since the images have been mapped into GRACoL 2006 Coated before they were encoded. It’s not much worse, though, since the part of the printer gamut that’s outside of sRGB is small.

I guess it’s that the experience of the book is physical and tactile as well as visual, and I’m surprised at how big a deal that is. This exercise also demonstrates to me that designing a document for screen viewing would give a completely different approach; the way you’re seeing the book on the screen is not the way I’d format it for the screen if it had never been a book.

I warn you that, if you don’t have a big, high-resolution monitor, you’re going to find that reading the text and titles is an exercise in frustration. Don’t even think about looking at it on a tablet or cell phone.

The electronic version that you can get to by following the link above doesn’t have the last-minute corrections made after we sent the InDesign files to Hemlock. If you look carefully, you’ll probably find a few errors. They are probably fixed in the printed copy. And no, I don’t want to hear about them now that the books are printed.