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ibooks ™ harnesses the latest digital technology to get its books published at the speed of the 21st century. Here’s how ibooks defined itself on its own website in 2003: “ibooks” made sense for a book publisher that defined itself as an internet company. Apple said the “i” stood for “Internet,” but also for “individuality” and “innovation.” It launched a tidal wave of products whose names started with an “I”. He wanted to take on the nascent ebook market. Let’s move onto something that’s more directly on-topic: The Dawn of ibooksīyron Preiss started ibooks in 1999 to facilitate putting novels into digital formats other than the fading CD-ROM format. I will save that story for the end of this article, just to help keep us focused here. He also wrote a book that caused a nationwide treasure hunt that still hasn’t ended. “ He was 30 years out of line, 30 years ahead of his time.“ Carl Reiner He published celebrity children’s books before they were a dime a dozen. In the 1990s, he worked on CD-ROM books, virtual comics, and ebooks. He won a Grammy Award for an audio book in 1985. (I wonder what he thought of Kyle Baker’s works a decade later.)īeyond that, Preiss worked in all the “future” technologies you could imagine when it came to books. Harvey, notably, wrote that these books didn’t qualify as comics. Preiss said there would never be word balloons because adult readers wouldn’t take them seriously.
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In particular, some fans didn’t think these books were actually comics as they featured text that ran alongside the art, instead of in word balloons inside the art. In other words, fans hated change and rebelled against a comics publisher who was determined to avoid many of the aesthetics of comics (panel borders, word balloons, the very word “comic book”) that Preiss used to separate himself from the pack. “ The Strange Case of Byron Preiss Visual Publications“ Attempts to do so were greeted with the suspicion that something integral to comics was being abandoned by BPVP’s efforts to elevate the medium through book publication. The hostile response to Byron Preiss’s graphic novels indicates there was no concerted, uniform will amongst fans, creators, and publishers to change the status of comics in American society. This was all done in the years before Will Eisner’s 1979 release, “Contract With God,” which is often cited as the first “graphic novel.”įor being ahead of his time, Preiss was not entirely warmly welcomed by the comics community, many of whom saw him as an intruder without proper geek cred. He used the terms “visual novel” and “graphic novel” for his publications.
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In the 1970s, he published graphic novels for adults decades before they were cool, including Jim Steranko’s “Red Tide”. Preiss was a noted book publisher, writer, and packager. If that name isn’t familiar to you, it means you weren’t reading comics between 19 or so. Ibooks was the brainchild of Byron Preiss.