Art books??

In this excellent discussion about the cultural migration from paper to ebooks, Engst and Ihnatko agree that all books pretty much eventually will be ebooks. Except art books. They laughed hardily at something like Adam Hughes best-selling Cover To Cover being viewed on the Kindle.

And that idea is indeed laughable. But it instantly becomes less laughable if you think about it on an iPad instead. Not great, but not laughable.

In fact, all we need, and we'll get it within a few years at most, is a tablet which weighs no more than the iPad, but has twice the screen area, and somewhat higher resolution, then you have a perfect vehicle for almost any art you could ever put in a book anyway. And the technology is already there.

I only own two art books with pages too large to show (in full at least) on such a screen: Little Nemo In Slumberland, and Acme Novelty Library*. But both of these are very exceptional.  And though you could not fit their pages on such a tablet, you could certainly easily read them and enjoy them.

Of course the bandwidth and storage demands for such books will be a few orders of magnitude bigger than with text, but 'eck, if we can handle films, we can handle high-rez art too. 

Maybe over the years I'm moving towards the paper/book/packaging-less home? I have nice book shelves, and they would look great if they had leather books on them which were all color-matched... But they are not.

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* Both are stunning books by the way. And I can't believe that ANL is only about twenny bucks now.
Little Nemo is huge. It's over twice the size of any book I've ever owned. The reason is that it was originally (a century ago) drawn and printed for Sunday papers, a full page, and they've kept this size.