Me and books

I am taking a short break from the Alternative Dictionary: I have just seen the last of the edits for Australian Survivor Kids, and the last of the final proofs of Australian Backyard Earth Scientist, which is now off to the printer.

That leaves me with four books I want to write before I hang up my pen: they are already in various stages of being written and illustrated, and for technical reasons, at least one of them is likely to be an e-book, because it is already longer than À la recherche du temps perdu and War and Peace, laid end to end.

Still, let's hear it for print books:

My friend Jan Gidge pointed me at the picture above, which is going the rounds of book lovers at the moment. I will never stop loving books, because when I was small and very young, books were very much my escape hatch, my window to a safer world. i won't elaborate, but I have always seen books as a safe refuge.

All the same, let's not write off ebooks. With print and ebooks, it's a case of horses for courses.

I had to poke one principal firmly back in his box for saying everything you need is on the internet for free. He was the sort who, if his personal library burnt down, would complain that he hadn't finished colouring the second one in yet.

The ebook medium is not the same as print, any more than a car is a horseless carriage, or radio is wireless telegraphy. Marshall McLuhan called that sort of insight 'rearview mirror driving'.

I, on the other hand, play both sides of the fence that separates the chalk from the cheese. Because I worked with some very clever people in the 1970s, I know to look at a medium, identify its weaknesses, and then exploit those to good effect. You can do the same things with the strengths of a medium, but the weaknesses are more useful.

I wrote 'The Big Book of Australian History' as a print medium book for the National Library of Australia, and it is (if I say so) a good book. It's now in its third edition, so I guess others agree with me.

BUT: what I am really proud of is the less-used ebook version of the first edition. It has the same text, but with less design layout to accommodate assorted devices, AND it has more than 500 hot links to take the reader straight into the original sources, or in some cases, into massive annotated lists of links. You can't really do that in print, though I did create a Trove list that could be used by print readers.

I'm definitely in favour of print when I read to my grandchildren, yet I hope that one day, my ebook version will be pointed to as the place where it all began. BUT: get between me and my dead-tree books, and prepare to die a lingering death.

And now, back to the Alternative Dictionary.