Books: Content Will Always Be King

Paper, or digital? Digital, or paper? Either way, content is king.

Content is always king. If design – physical or visual – gets in the way of content, then it is no good. Period.

Going green, a recent trend in today’s culture, hasn’t really spoken up about how many trees would be saved if print died out as a distribution model. Newspapers and magazines are still viable advertising options for spreading the idea of “going green.”

And, according to one former book designer, poetry or text with graphics still fare better in print form. But, Craig Mod believes that novels and non-fiction, both that are “divorced from form” lend themselves nicely to digital distribution instead of paper. The digital format stays out of the way of the content.

That, in a nutshell, is the true value of a book, no matter what form that book takes. As long as the book is read, its value remains intact 100 percent.

Bringing the infinite number of books into digital format would make all the content readily available at a moment’s notice. Best sellers won’t run out of stock, country folk can download immediately instead of waiting for the next trip to town or UPS to deliver an Amazon order, and best of all, it is readily available for full content searches.

Mod proposed that the growth of digital and the pruning of paper form will cause us to rethink how we tell stories. He says that the linear beginning-middle-end story construction is static and that the digital format will “prompt a new range of thinking about stories and how to tell them.”

Without the linear beginning-middle-end, my thinking is that, instead of readily available, unlimited information will degrade into chaos and lose all value. That’s too close to schizophrenia for my comfort.

Content is the king, and the value of the written word.