Fetishizing physical photobooks
As Darius Himes points out in his post: “Publishers are not really debating the future of ‘books,’ if by books we mean the future of ‘recorded human language.’ They are debating the future of the sales of printed books in the quantities they are used to.”
The same goes for photobooks. Except that photobooks have, by and large, always been a hard sell to publishers. They are usually printed in small runs (3-5,000) and are rarely big money-makers.
In some ways this is the perfect time for physical photobooks to come into their own as true art objects. In the same way that analogue and even antique processes are hot right now, traditional and experimental photobooks could become fetishized, high-demand art pieces, as Jonathan Worth explains below and in his Future of Photobooks post.
