The Book is Dead.
Long Live the Book-Shaped Objects.
As we are in a scramble to find the right container for digital books, we’re left with the problem of finding a new place and role for their old paper shells. What is the future of the socially significant paper containers from which books have been released? We read more and more longform contents on our iPads and Kindles. This means that, pretty soon, information about our intellectual profile and cultural tastes will be available to others almost exclusively in the digital realm (in our social network profiles, in apps like Instapaper or in social reading services like Goodreads) and won’t be inferable anymore from the cover of a book we’re reading on a bus trip or by exploring the book collection in our living room. But what if we could still convey something about our cultural persona through book-shaped objects - namely books that have been reimagined as different functional objects but that still have the capacity to make our cultural choices visible?
The Repurposed Library: 33 Craft
Projects That Give Old Books New Life
By Lisa Occhipinti
Playing with Books:
The Art of Upcycling, Deconstructing, and Reimagining the Book
By Jason Thompson
