xkcd... the book ?!?!?

from Sam Goodman:

 

When Pixels Find New Life on Real Paper

IT'S not exactly Quentin Tarantino directing Ibsen, or Jeff Gordon racing go-carts, but the idea that Randall Munroe, creator of the online comic strip xkcd — wildly popular among techies the world over for its witty use of programming code in its gags — would for the first time publish a book is still something of a head scratcher.

 

xkcd.com

Not a book for Kindle, I should add. A print book — you know, dead trees, ink, no text search, nonadjustable font size. The plan is for an initial press run of 10,000 copies sometime around June. And judging by the enthusiasm of the strip's fans, who frequently act out the concepts in the strip in real life, those copies should sell quickly.

So, are we seeing an all-too-rare example of the triumph of print books over digital content? Does even an online legend like the 24-year-old Mr. Munroe crave the respectability of print? (Mr. Munroe once before climbed the respectability ladder when in October he competed against the illustrator Farley Katz of The New Yorker in a "cartoon-off." No winner was declared.)

In fact, the xkcd story previews the much more likely future of books in which they are prized as artifacts, not as mechanisms for delivering written material to readers. This is print book as vinyl record — admired for its look and feel, its cover art, and relative permanence — but not so much for convenience.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/media/20link.html?_r=1

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 If they publish something as old fashioned as a "book", then it will have to come with an audio mp3 instruction manual to let the tech-savants know how to OPERATE that ancient piece of technology:

 

There is no START button on a "book."  When you want to view the contents, you must grab the "cover" by an outer edge, and lift it off the "pages"....

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