Can you judge a book by its cover? After all, first impressions are often right… right? So when I picked up the book Metamedia, I knew I had a winner in my hands. After all, the cover literally displays user-interface elements of Adobe InDesign: the Tools panel and the Control panel (set, of course, to character formatting mode).
Is this “meta” enough for you?
Whatever the topic, the cover art tells us that the book must be amazing!
Sadly, Metamedia has nothing to do with InDesign. It’s a deeply academic treatise on the nature of literature in a time of electronic texts. OK, the word InDesign does appear three times in the book (according to the index), but in each case it is a side note, almost incidental—as though any other page-layout software could be inserted just as easily. InDesign is not the central protagonist of this story! The author apparently has some other agenda, involving phrases such as “paratextual framing” (no, nothing to do with graphic or text frames) and “the dialectic of digitization” (which I’m quite sure does not appear in any InDesign menu).
That said, the cover design (which I assume was created by the same person who designed the interior, Sara Sauers) is wonderfully “meta” media itself… not only is the title set in the font “Meta Pro” but the Control panel at the top of the cover shows it:
While this book may interest doctoral students and other masochists, it will not help you master InDesign or provide the sorts of insights into the mysteries of the Tool and Control panels that you may have become accustomed to by reading articles here at InDesignSecrets.
The book is Metamedia: American Book Fictions and Literary Culture after Digitization by Alexander Starre, published by University of Iowa Press.
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on September 13, 2017
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