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As print books get ever more beautiful, digital innovation gets left behind.
Last week I found myself at Van der Velde, an incredible bookstore in Zwolle, in the east of the Netherlands. My daughter had heard about its large young-adult book selection, my wife and I were curious about its unique location, and we happened to be nearby. So we decided to go on a little pilgrimage.
Van der Velde is located in a converted church that was originally built in the 15th century. It has a massive antique church organ that’s still operational. On both lengths of the building’s nave, multiple floors full of book tables and shelves have been raised, yet only a fraction of the available vertical space is in use.
Most of our time was spent in the English YA section. As is often the case in bookstores in the Netherlands now, it’s larger than the Dutch YA section—the store’s entire upper floor is devoted to this genre. English YA is simply what Dutch kids these days hear about on TikTok, and surely reading it feels more like the streaming shows they watch.
But I wasn’t thinking about language as I overlooked this floor and the cavernous space around it. I was thinking about the embellishments of the current crop of YA books: the colourful hardback covers, the embossed lettering, the ornamentation on the typography within the pages, the ribbon bookmarks, even the various paraphernalia included in the collectible box sets they’re sometimes sold in… Being surrounded by a hand-crafted, meticulously decorated building from medieval times, this wasn’t the most random segue.
I was especially curious about what turns out to be called ‘edge-printing’, the technique whereby the cutting edges of a book’s page block are decorated. Appropriately, this goes back hundreds of years, to monks decorating their hand-copied tomes.
In a way, it’s the cherry on top (or actually on the side): the last thing you could possibly make beautiful, when everything else is already beautiful. And the hardest thing too. Then, and now, when you’ve already spent a bunch of time and resources on paper, printing and binding, and still feel like you aren’t done, you add edge-printing (or as the monks called it, ‘fore-edge painting’, but in Latin I suppose).
None of this is crazy. Edge-printing may be tough and costly, but it’s also irresistible. It looks amazing on BookTok and in converted churches. People like my daughter love to have it on their personal bookshelves. It pays off to be on the cutting edge.
Yes, you know how to do this, and you know how to sell this. It’s fully in your comfort zone. Digital innovation, on the other hand, is hard and scary.
I was learning all this during my visit to Van der Velde, doing research from my new iPhone, when a weird paradox struck me. My phone’s screen has incredible screen resolution, colour depth and luminance. It has HDR (High Dynamic Range) and can refresh its picture 120 times each second, which is silly smooth. My phone could render a YA book’s edge imagery in incredible detail, much livelier than the most costly printing process, much more precise than the most diligent monk. It could even animate that image, add some sound, make it interactive… Yet if I were to open an e-book version of the gorgeous YA book on the table before me, I would be presented with a quite sharply rendered, but otherwise plain rendition of the book’s prose and not much else.
I’ve been in this business long enough to know all the ‘yes, buts’. Yes, many people and companies have tried valiantly to enrich and enhance e-books, but it was expensive and didn’t lead to the dreamed revenues. Yes, but what about Amazon market domination, Apple and Google taxes, social media and other device distractions – books beaten by BookTok?
In a way, this current wave of highly decorated print books is itself a response to our device and media usage. Here is something pure and real, that allows for that badly needed moment of quiet, aesthetics and physicality. In another paradox, this is why beautifully printed books work so well on social media—they’re something authentic that we can aspire to. (This is also why vinyl records have seen such a resurgence, and the same can be said about stores in unique locations.)
So I understand why publishers are doubling down on things like edge-printing. But in a way, it’s just too convenient. Yes, you know how to do this, and you know how to sell this. It’s fully in your comfort zone. Digital innovation, on the other hand, is hard and scary.
Again, standing in that church, pondering medieval monks, I thought about how digital innovation is a craft too, that could lead to ever-more attractive results. Once you get to the other side of the Dunning-Kruger curve, value starts stacking up. Attack vectors start presenting themselves. Beauty is such a big part of analogue publishing—now what needs to happen to add it to the digital repertoire?
I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m just saying you should try more. Try again. At my company, Immer, we’ve been building a way to diverge from the ePub format, unlocking a more digital-native way of reading that should feel more like BookTok, with smooth animations, colourful backgrounds and even a social layer built into the book itself. With our Immer Reading System we create the building blocks so you can explore different formats and business models—but the point I want to emphasise here is: beauty!
I certainly don’t have all the answers. I hope we’re on to something, but I also hope that others will come up with fresh alternative approaches, challenging the very idea of what’s possible in digital reading, just as monks might have challenged each other to decorate their work in ever-more inventive ways. What’s the digital equivalent of fanned fore-edge painting, that my daughter could get psyched about on TikTok? What’s the digital equivalent that could make my wife and I undertake the metaphorical equivalent to our trip to Zwolle?
It’s high time publishers put as much effort into finding the answer to these questions as they do into gilding their paper opuses.