Hasta La Ideas

Following up on our post from last week about LA Times reporter Dan Neil‘s tearing apart ad man Alex Bogusky‘s new book Baked In, the affronted author has decided to reply to the bad review with a bad review of his own, though not with his own mightier-than-sword pen. Bogusky has posted on his blog an unpublished letter to the Times‘ editors, written by fellow ad man Ernest Lupinacci, which attempts to take Neil and his review down a few pegs. There are certainly some well-reasoned thoughts therein, and delivered very well (so much so that we worried that maybe we were a little harsh in our initial post when we sorta kinda sided with the review). But as we reread, we think Neil still has the upper hand, given some of Lupinacci’s odd arguments (Bogusky himself admits, “Sometimes Ernest is so smart I have no idea what he’s saying”) and Bogusky’s opening statements (he brings up that the reviewer usually works for the paper’s automotive section, which is interesting, but we don’t understand why that disqualifies Neil from having an opinion). But your opinion on the debate is entirely your own and we will say no more about it (unless, god forbid, there’s a reaction to the reaction to the reaction).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Let’s start this last day of the work week a little mean, shall we? Currently making the rounds in the ad agency world is Dan Neil‘s scathing review of modern ad icon Alex Bogusky‘s latest book (co-written with John Winsor), Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses That Market Themselves. While Neil admits there are the occasional useful thoughts in the very, very slim book, he spends most of his review tearing it apart, saying that most of it is either very obvious words of wisdom (“better products tend to sell better”) or not entirely grounded in reality. He sums it all up nicely toward the beginning when he writes “perhaps Bogusky and Winsor never had an editor to challenge them on some of the most evident holes in their book.” It’s a great picking apart of the book (we’ve always been a little critical of Bogusky’s literary work ourselves), but also seems to have a wide spread, speaking to the many other self/business-help books that follow that “well this is all great, but how does it apply to the real world?” model.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

A couple of weeks back, we told you all about UnBeige 3.0’s Alissa Walker‘s great City Walks Architecture. And while we yammered on about that release, we briefly mentioned UnBeige 2.0’s Eva Hagberg‘s upcoming book through Monacelli, Dark Nostalgia, but hadn’t been able to say much more than “It’s coming out soon!” But now that it’s out, we wanted to give it its justly due by saying that we’ve gotten a chance to check it out and have aptly drooled all over its gorgeous pages. It’s chock full of beautiful, mostly dimly-lit, cozy-yet-cool interiors of restaurants, hotels, and houses, all of which caused us to suffer through a variety of feelings, from hunger to sleepiness to, perhaps most frequently, outright envy. It’s a great look at the blending of the modern with the classic.

And while we’re on book talk, with our copy of Dark Nostalgia, we also just got a sneak peek of the not-yet-released, five volume series Architecture of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, which is now ranked highly on our wish list for the upcoming holidays. We’ve only seen the final book, which covers 1997 to 2008, but judging from that, the whole collection should be just incredible. The edition we’ve seen runs through the most high-profile and/or impressive buildings the firm put together over that span of time, making you regularly stop to think “I didn’t know SOM did that one, too!” If you’re an architecture buff, it’s a great batch of information (and if you live in Chicago, where SOM calls home, you really don’t have any excuse not to show some local pride by taking a look when the whole series gets released in mid-November).

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dezeen and architecture and design book publisher Birkhäuser are offering readers the chance to win  one of five copies of Chroma – Design, Architecture and Art in Colour by Barbara Glasner & Petra Schmidt. (more…)

As the book industry struggles to come to grips with the challenges to print sales presented by ebooks, accelerated by the arrival on UK shores this week of Amazon’s Kindle, publishers are having to become increasingly inventive with the main selling feature available to them in the shops: the book cover.

Scholastic Press has released a wonderfully-covered version of Chris Wooding’s Young Adult novel Malice (a book about London teens who get trapped inside a nasty comic book). Witht the hardback version of the book out in the US this month, the new edition has a cover bearing a 3-D plastic figure and title, the brainchild of Alison Padley, Scholastic’s UK design manager.

Alison Padley’s ‘flat design’ for the 3D cover of Malice

Padley commissioned and art directed artist Dan Chernett’s comic book-style illustrations for the interior of the book and the cover, and coupled these with a 3-D moulding technique. “I thought when I initially saw it that the moulding would be great to use on a book cover at some point, since as far as I know that had never before been done.”

Using one of Chernett’s illustrations of Tall Jake, a character who transports the protagonists into the book’s fantasy world, she made a flat design and consulted with Claire Tagg, Scholastic’s production director. “There are five levels of depth in the mould,” Padley says. “So basically we considered what points in the artwork stand out most and went from there. As the printer worked, he sent us emails of the various stages.” Tagg comments that, even with the special cover, the UK version of Malice is still priced at the standard paperback rate.

Printer proofs of Malice’s moulded cover

An increasingly used technique for mainstream hardbacks is the printed laminated cover, which removes the need for a dustjacket. Pioneered a couple of years ago by independent publisher Canongate with Scarlett Thomas’ The End of Mr Y, the process is being used for Acts of Violence, debut author Ryan David Jahn’s forthcoming novel from Macmillan New Writing.

Will Atkins, Macmillan’s Editorial Director for Fiction says:

“PLC novels remain fairly unusual, and in the case of Acts of Violence this minimal, less fussy treatment matches the starkness of the cover image (something that’s emphasised by the blood red endpapers), which in turn reflects the spare-ness and immediacy of the writing. It’s also b-format – an unusual size for a hardback.”

Macmillan’s hope for Acts of Violence is that these design elements appeal to the book’s core readership, but are distinctive enough to seduce those attracted by strong design to pick it up off the shelves.

Picador’s new release, Dr Ragab’s Universal Language also lacks a dustjacket, and has gold foiling in addition to the print added straight to the cover. The cover for Acts of Violence was designed in-house by Stuart Wilson

But with the Kindle increasing its reach, Sony’s Reader series competing hard with Amazon and the unveiling yesterday of Barnes & Noble’s dual-screen Nook in the US (and its tie-in with Adobe), do innovative cover designs for mainstream novels really have any hope of stalling the mass adoption of ebooks?

Barnes & Noble’s Nook, released this week to compete with Amazon’s Kindle, has both an e-ink viewer and LCD touchscreen