Because I’m such a modern guy, I downloaded Keith Richards” Life on my iPad, read it, and really liked it (see previous posting).
OK, the plot thickens: my son Will is a musician, living in Santa Cruz (Calif.) and is working with engineer Rich Williams of Paradise Recording studio on a recording device that, in Will’s words: “… (uses) analog tape to get a sound that feels good. Analog recording is like a hand built home, whereas digital recording is analogous to a prefab house. This way is old fashioned, imperfect, and feels better.”
If you read my previous post about what the Stones were doing 40+ years ago, it sounds a lot like what Paradise recordings’ hardware is doing in the 21st century. Why am I not surprised that deviating from the purely digital can up the soul factor?
SO: I wanted to show Will the bit about Keith and the acoustic guitar/tape-deck bit, and looked around on my iPad, couldn’t find it. That afternoon we went to Bookshop Santa Cruz (see below), and I picked up the real book. Wow! There just ain’t no comparison. I could thumb through the pages, skip back and forth at will, the photos were way better. Thus was a 3-dimensional object, way more than anything on a flat screen. Tactile. By comparison, luscious.
It made me realize that physical hold-in-your-hands books aren’t dead. Nor are bookstores (the good ones) going to disappear. Radio didn’t replace TV, etc. (We bought $160 worth of books and magazines that day.)
Our books with 1000+ photos are unique physical objects (wait until you see our next one!), and just ain’t going to work nearly as well on a flat screen.
We had a good discussion here last week about Ebooks (which are here to stay) vs. real books. I’ve finally got the other side of the equation now that I’ve read a few Ebooks. For years I’ve been hearing the technorati’s doom and gloom predictions for real books and real publishers. Well, the reports of our death(s) are greatly exaggerated.
