Books Made with Disappearing Ink Strategically Fade Away

How about this for a new pub­lish­ing mod­el? The Buenos Aires pub­lish­er Eter­na Caden­cia has start­ed to pub­lish books made with dis­ap­pear­ing ink. Once you crack open the cov­er, you have two months to fin­ish the book, or else you’ll be star­ing at a blank page. If books have an expi­ra­tion date, read­ers won’t let them sit idly on their shelves. They’ll read books more often, and give more authors a try. That’s the log­ic of this new twist on pub­lish­ing..

Books aren’t dead yet. They’re just inten­tion­al­ly fad­ing away.…

via Gal­ley Cat

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Secret Book­store in New York City

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Books Savored in Stop Motion Film

Going West: A Stop Motion Nov­el


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Comments (7)
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  • Colin says:

    That is a ter­ri­ble idea.

  • peak says:

    … And once all the ink fades away, you can use the book as a note­book or a diary and pos­si­bly bring it to your school or work. An inter­est­ing AND envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly solu­tion, at the first glance.

    How­ev­er, what if I want to re-read the book? If I could just vis­it a library, I would­n’t need to buy the book the first time. There is a num­ber of rea­sons why not to bor­row books from libraries. Let’s say I’m just not a huge fan of libraries. I’d have to buy the book again, only this time a “per­ma­nent edi­tion” of it, an extreme­ly inef­fi­cient con­cept.

    Per­haps the prob­lem could be solved by grant­i­ng read­ers a license to legal­ly down­load an elec­tron­ic ver­sion of the book, once the two-month peri­od expires. But could this be done in a way that does NOT demo­ti­vate the read­er to fin­ish his old-fash­ioned paper-made book before the peri­od expires?

  • Jonathan says:

    I’m not sure this is such a good idea. It just sounds like a huge waste of paper to me. Book paper isn’t the best for writ­ing in since the pages are so thin and paper­backs espe­cial­ly would not make very good note­books. Plus, how many jour­nals does a per­son real­ly need? If the end goal is to get peo­ple to read more books then I guess they also want every­one to become pro­lif­ic jour­nalers. To me this is just a scheme to force peo­ple to have to buy more books with a new idea and an “envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly” label.

  • Barak says:

    That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.

  • peak says:

    Over­all, I too think it’s a bad idea.

    And I admit, I did­n’t think about paper qual­i­ty in rela­tion to the writ­ing expe­ri­ence. Thanks for point­ing that out!

  • momoes says:

    gim­micky. what if you want to read it again? and what about the best part of read­ing a good book.…sharing it.

  • anonymous says:

    I know that it may end up being pile ups of blank books, but maybe the idea is just to START mak­ing peo­ple read. Once they decide that read­ing isn’t that bad and that they want to keep read­ing and re-read­ing the books they love, maybe they’ll start buy­ing per­ma­nent books or ebooks or some­thing.
    But per­son­al­ly, I am com­plete­ly in love with this idea. And plus, I’d end up with a cou­ple new sketch­books! And maybe some­one can find a way to make the ink show up again that you can buy if you want to re-read the book… I dun­no. just thoughts…

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