Glatfelter is a paper company that provides paper stock for book publishers. Given this, I'm not sure that their motto of "Beyond Paper" is the best they could have come up with, but that's a whole 'nother post. What brought the company to my attention is a recent ad that it ran in Publisher's Weekly (click the picture to see it in more detail).
If you just read the words, your tactile book-loving senses would go crazy. You know ... where you enjoy the feel of the book in your hand ... you can pause without hitting a button ... you can reread that baffling sentence six or seven times until you finally figure it out. That sort of thing. The ad makes a case for "the value of the printed word," and more specifically, for printing on "free-sheet trade book paper."
Book publishers, presumably, will know what this is. For those of us who buy books only one at a time, it's a high quality paper free of noticeable wood pulp.
The text takes up about 40 percent of the ad space. A Mark Twainesque photograph consumes the rest, complete with a riverboat, a boy with a bucket of whitewash, and a second boy in patched blue jeans listening to his iPod. So what's wrong with this picture?
From my perspective, nothing at all. But how odd that in an ad about book paper, there's no book and no paper. But there is an MP3 player. Try as ad designers might, even they can't beat the zeitgeist. Yes, a boy reading while leaning against a fence might be inartistically obvious and humdrum, but it would at least be on message. The message here is that if a book IS anywhere in the picture, it's that the boy on the barrel is consuming it in A New Millennium Manner--in audio on his portable player.
Hey, I love the feel of a book in my hands too, but I love books just as much when mainlined straight to my ears. Hey, I'm just relating what a full page ad shows me: publishers that react to the power of audio will soon have those that don't over a barrel.
