Among other things, I talked about one of my favourite books from when I was small: Look Out the Window by Joan Walsh Anglund.
You can see it here and if you read on it is followed by one with the wonderful Shaun Tan. He quite eloquently answers a question I tried to address with a class a few weeks ago:
Yeah! What he said.
WHERE do you think technology is taking the picture book?
I'm not sure. I think the traditional picture book will remain relatively unchanged, but you'll have new narrative forms growing up around it, not unlike the relationship between theatre and film, radio and TV, painting and photography. While I could see e-books potentially eclipsing paper-back novels, the same is not true for picture books, because they are already carefully made objects, where format, printing, physical design and texture are inherently critical elements, and not easily substituted. What you'll find is that those stories and concepts better suited to a digital medium will move across. It may even mean more attention to the production quality of paper books, given they have to 'justify' their non-digital form.
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