Our monthly gathering of typography geeks in the bookstore-basement bar had seemed like a good place to gather some feedback on an unusual book. To my right, John D. Berry, president of the international typographic association, ATypI, had been thoroughly unimpressed; he held the book gingerly between thumb and forefinger as he handed it back to me. After checking to see whether it had gotten smeared by an appetizer (it hadn’t), I wondered briefly if he thought it was radioactive, or perhaps contagious.

I passed the book to graphic designer and Seattle AIGA president Jeff Barlow, on my left, and asked what he thought of the tome’s claims of sparking a new renaissance in book design. “People have been doing crap for centuries,” was Barlow’s reply after leafing through it, declaring it neither new nor particularly well-executed.

The subject of their disdain was a colorful hardcover: Goodbye Gutenberg by Valerie Kirschenbaum. The most interesting thing about it is not that it is loved by some of those few members of the general public who have read it, nor that it is not-quite-universally reviled by designers, but rather that people hate it for so many different reasons. And while I sympathize with the intent of the book, I share most of their misgivings.

Its main thesis is that most written material today is presented in a fashion that younger generations find boring and dull; it needs to be much livelier to compete with TV, film, music videos and console and computer games. The main way to do that is through extensive use of color, with graphics and imagery. Illuminated manuscripts and graphic novels are examples of written forms that work better. The people to do this will be the content creators themselves, who will become a new breed of  “designer writers^TM” (yes, she claims a trademark on the term).

What’s wrong with all this? It depends on who you ask. As has sometimes been bemoaned here in the pages of CA, graphic designers and typographers are often dismayed when they discover that they are competing with the client’s completely untrained spouse/child/buddy to get a commission. It seems that a large chunk of the general public doesn't realize that training and experience are important in design and typography.

Professionals with such worries might be concerned by Ms. Kirschenbaum, who never suggests that any training, beyond her book, is necessary to become a “designer writer.” She rails against “experts” who deride her ideas by putting down her lack of training and credentials. One can certainly understand her frustration and anger at these ad hominem attacks; her lack of training, in and of itself, is not a reason to put down her ideas.

But we can tackle her ideas on their own merits. Those of us with a printing background might first question an underlying assumption of the book: that printing in color with lots of graphics is not much more expensive than straight text in black- and-white. Ms. Kirschenbaum justifies this belief by noting that there are plenty of full-color cookbooks in the $30 range. She then decides that we could have our best-selling paperbacks in full color, if only we wanted to. Elsewhere she points out that costs of printing text with several colors today are similar to those of just printing black 80 years ago. Somehow, such observations generate the leap that “if our reluctance to publish literature in color was not cost, it must be cultural.”

Now, there may indeed be cultural (or historical/inertia) factors in our not making broader use of color in book publishing, but color is neither free nor cheap. Many of Ms. Kirschenbaum’s examples are for class handouts (she’s a high school teacher), so I examined the means one might use for such output, and the increased cost of doing full-color text plus graphics with 25 percent color coverage against just black-and-white text. Low-end inkjets ran 2.5 to 3 times as much for color output. Low-end laser printers, typically seven times as much--not coincidentally FedEx Kinko's uses the same multiplier for color vs. black-and-white output. A high-volume color laser operated in-house might get down to only three times, but that’s still significant. I also noted that Goodbye Gutenberg itself is a full-bleed, 4-color publication, with a run of 4,700 copies. Worzalla Publishing quoted me 43 percent more to print a book with identical specs in full CMYK instead of black-and-white (same graphics and full bleed on either).

So, the idea that cost isn’t a factor in choosing black-and-white output over color is dubious. But is there also a cultural reluctance to use color in print? Well, with text on-screen, where color truly isn’t any more expensive or difficult, we see plenty of it. I’d argue the issue is not, in fact, solely cultural.