I had a customer who emailed me to enquire whether I had any of my books in printed format as he found e-books annoying!
Well, since everything I sell these days is digital, I was unable to help him with regard to printed versions of my books, and in my reply to him I expressed the view that it was a shame that he found e-books annoying, since surely the contents were the important part of a book’s value, and they were exactly the same irrespective in which format the book itself was delivered.
He replied saying that he was a magic book collector and so digital versions were not really of any use to him.
So this opens up a debate, I suppose, as to where the true value of a magic publication really lies. Is it invested in the quality of the magic content, or is it bound up (excuse the pun!) in the physical object itself?
The answer no doubt depends on your personal viewpoint, or the reason why you are purchasing the book in the first place. I can completely empathise with the customer wanting, as a collector, a nice hard backed book to slide onto his bookshelf. I love well produced hard backed books myself, and there is an undoubted innate pleasure to be had from owning an object that is, in itself, a thing of beauty.
But the trouble is, magic is a performance art, and as such, books have for centuries been the means by which the methods and artifice of that art is distributed. Without books, it is doubtful whether many of the millions of secrets of magic would have survived and been passed from one generation to the next, and so I would contend that the contents of the books have a greater importance than the actual books themselves.
Of course, I am a performer more than a collector, and so naturally my priorities are skewed in favour of the contents, but I would still maintain that the book itself, if it consisted of nothing but blank pages, could still be a beautiful object but that it needs the content for it to be elevated to something truly great or important.
E-books are a practical and economical way to provide information. No matter how nicely they are designed, I accept that they will never be as nice to ‘hold’ or use as a real, bound tome can be. But as a means to an end, the end being to disseminate magical information, I would say they have an important role to play.
In fact, I would even go as far as to say that without e-books, a large number of truly great ideas might be lost to future generations simply because the creator did not have the means to publish them. And I would rather the ideas got out there than were consigned to the creative dustbin simply because the inventor lacked the funds to publish a book.
The truth is, both formats have their value and their place in the magic world. Some ideas are not worthy of a printed book , in that the expense of producing one is not justified by the contents, whereas other bodies of work deserve to be encased in a quality hard backed book as a reflection of the importance of the material. But although digital may be seen as the poor relation, it does have its place, and is therefore not just ‘annoying’.