Well-Read Life™

Still Fits

Sitting in my office the other day, our VP of IT lifted out his (new) iPhone from his (old) Levenger Bomber Jacket phone holster.

“Still fits,” he pronounced.

Had we planned it that way? Or were we lucky?

Actually, it was a bit of both.

Levenger has long been a company that looks back and forward at the same time. Many customers know us for our fountain pens and note pads. But we were also the first company to offer the very first e-reader, the Rocket eBook, back in the 1990s. We’re currently at work on bringing out our first Levenger Press e-book, even as we continue to make our paper books ever more wondrous objects.  And we love making products that fit the iPad and others of its e-ilk.

We call our half-virtual, half-physical approach one of productive coexistence—pc, Levenger-style. There’s a bit of the new and old in most of us. Check out our Bomber Jacket collection, and the cool new Grid-It and Timbuk2 selections as tangible proof.

We don’t make the smartphones, but we make smart cases that fit them—and they will likely last through several generations of these tech wonders. Our bags and laptop sleeves likewise are designed to serve you longer than several typical laptops and table PCs.

We don’t create online project management systems, but we design paper note-taking systems that can work in sync and supplement them. All of use keyboards, but most of us also like to use the older technologies of pens and paper.

Levenger lap desks work for handwritten letters and paper books and just as well for laptops and e-readers. Our dictionary and bookstands likewise fit the new electronic readers, even though they were designed for their papery predecessors. And there's nothing wrong with using a Levenger Thai Pad for your iPad and then later for your beautifully printed paper book.

It still fits.

A good fit—for life, and for productivity

Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, maintained in a recent Wall Street Journal article that technology is quite literally changing the way we think. And yet no matter how our brains shift, our hearts remain steadfast. We humans strive to be in touch and stay in touch, but we still yearn for the physical touch. As a headline in the New York Times cautioned, “To win over today’s users, gadgets have to be touchable.”

Still fits.

How about you, dear reader—do you find yourself balancing old and new? And do the two still fit? I’d love to hear how you do it. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Linger a bit with that page in your fingers

The other night my family and I watched on DVD “The Day After Tomorrow,” a disaster thriller made in 2004 about the calamitous effects of global warming. While only six years old, the movie dated itself with its computer monitors the size of Coleman coolers. It made me wonder what commonplace item in six years will so glaringly date our time.

One answer may have come a couple weeks ago in New York City, at the annual trade show for the book industry. An industry expert, addressing the booksellers, authors and publishers unwrapping their box lunches, predicted that by 2016 digital books will account for half of all books sold.

Will someone sitting on a park bench reading a book made of paper date our time?

Flying high on apps

On my flight home from the conference, I happened to sit next to a young mother flying with her 22-month old daughter. Her little girl started to fuss as we began our initial descent, until Mom handed over her iPhone. The toddler, while sucking on her pacifier, handily swept word-image flash cards—from turtle to giraffe to duck, the latter quacking when the girl poked it.

The next day, my family and I went to dinner at an old Florida diner. The sign out front said “since 1950.”As we walked to our booth, I spotted an old salt eating alone at the counter, reading on a Kindle.

Predicting the future is tricky business, even for professionals like Paul Saffo.  “Good forecasts always seem wildly unlikely before the fact, and crushingly obvious after they have come to pass,” warns this oft-consulted Silicon Valley sage. Paul also cautions against mistaking a clear view for a short distance. Future events unfold along an s-curve: they take forever to arrive, but when they do, they occur literally overnight.

Change was in the book-fair air, and it’s hard not to admire much of it. Booth after booth was showing demos of digital books whose illustrations moved like pictures in a Hogwarts wizard manual. At one booth, the vendor showed how students could share their textbook annotations with friends on Facebook.

Amy Hertz, the editor of the book section of the Huffington Post, told me, “The evidence is that reading is up—reading on screens as well as reading in print—and that’s exciting.”

Yet young people who will live most of their lives in the present century will not well remember the golden age of printed books. They may only dimly recall seeing books stacked like cord wood in stores and stuffed into impossibly heavy backpacks shouldered by college students.

The writing is (still) in the book

No one today remembers what it was like to cross the Atlantic on a ship powered only by sails. You’d have to be 100 to recall the golden age of silent movies. Only through histories such as Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (available in both print and electronic formats) can we learn that silent movies had their own art. In some ways it was superior to the art of sound movies we know today.

Will future generations assume that books printed on paper must have been inferior to the digital books they know? Don’t we assume that ancient readers must have happily given up their scrolls when shown books on pages? Don’t we assume they must have applauded the boon of movable type?

At Levenger, we are designing new products for iPads and the other magic tablets to come. But we’re also conspiring to make our Levenger Press books more beautiful than ever. We hope readers will want to continue to give paper books as gifts—especially if those books are compelling in content and appearance, especially if they accentuate textures and other attributes still hard to trump by digital devices.

In a recent article in the New York Times (still thrown onto our driveway), Peter Khoury mused on how charming and mysterious handwritten inscriptions in paper books can be. It’s ironic that writing in books, so frowned upon by our teachers, is one way likely to preserve their value.

In our lovingly produced Levenger Press books, we’ll be sure to leave room in the front for writing inscriptions to your loved ones. I invite you to join us in our little conspiracy to keep printed books lingering a while longer.

And for all you children of the 20th century now living in the 21st, how do you think you’ll be reading six years hence? I’d love to hear your comments. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

And because some of you are already e-reading, I’ll let you in on a secret: we’re currently working on adding a fifth “e” to “Levenger Press,” and will soon be offering our first electronic book.

Levenger’s Unlikely Love Affair with the iPad

At Levenger we took particular interest in the launch of Apple’s iPad. That “particular interest” is known as suspicion. We were suspicious of iPads the way sailmakers must have been suspicious of steamships.

Would this slim electronic wonder severely trim our non-electronic sails?

On iDay (April 5th), we gingerly lifted two iPads from their pristine white boxes (wasn’t the Trojan Horse white?) and began to gently poke these high-tech newborns in our low-tech product development nursery here at Levenger headquarters.

Their waif-thin glass and aluminum bodies were in marked contrast to the wood and leather and pens and paper that fill the Levenger nursery (and catalog, and website).

And—oh dear: our iPads didn’t need leather bookweights to keep them open. They didn’t need highlighters or PageNibs to mark their virtual pages. And somehow they didn’t seem completely at home on wooden bookshelves.

Didn’t our newborn iPads need something we offered?

Well, yes: they needed strollers to get around. Or rather, bags.

It’s in the (i)bag

Most any of our bags would work...

       

...but our svelte iPads opened up smaller possibilities—especially our popular Bomber Jacket Messenger, which I used to take one of our iPads on its first trip, leaving my laptop home sulking.

Knowing our customers as we do, we know that often those who are highest tech also love paper, such as our Circa notebooks, and pens. Happily, our leather Circa Zip Folios were designed to carry some slim stuff in addition to a Circa notebook or agenda. They took to the iPads like loving older sisters to a baby, slipping them right inside their folds.

     

Equally greedy to hold the new iPad babies were our Briefolios.

   

Most closely protective of all was our 10” Flak Jacket, since it was designed to provide serious protection to iPad-size netbooks, cosseting them in a rough-and-tumble world.

Soon our product developers were feeling happy, holding and protecting iPads in a wide assortment of Levenger carriers.

The next step was to try our iPads out for actual reading—and that led to a surprising discovery.

Guess what?

The surprise is not that iPads are great to read with. I’ve read on the Kindle, which is wonderful in its own way, but in my opinion, the iPad is even better because of its color, which can be easily dimmed to papery hues.

The iBook app on the iPad has the features you’d expect from a digital book (well, except for writing in the margins). It delighted us in the many ways we can turn pages, scale type bigger or smaller, highlight passages, look up words, and skip from book to book in our virtual library.

There’s just one problem: holding the iPad is not as comfortable as holding an old-fashioned paper book.

The iPad’s rigid glass and aluminum body doesn’t provide the flex of a paper book that our hands have gotten used to. While paper books accommodate our hands, the iPad makes our hands accommodate it. We found ourselves wanting to rest the iPad on something, such as a pillow or a contented cat.

Being short on cats, we picked up our popular Thai Book Rest and voila! It was perfect.

Though we designed it for paper books, the cushy mellowness of the Thai design holds the iPad at a perfect angle, holds it securely and comfortably, and provides a rest for your hands as they touch-turn pages or highlight a passage with your finger.

And the same Thai Book Rest displays the iPad beautifully on a conference table, or family-room bar, so that one or two people can see and touch its magical screen to surf the web, or turn the pages of a virtual cookbook.

Serene serendipity

I wish I could claim our designers were prescient enough to design our Thai Book Rest for the iPad and other magic tablets sure to follow. But it’s an accident. A marvelous accident, to be sure, and it makes us smile at the new iPad babies in our midst and wonder what else we can design just for them, and even their next generation.

Comments? Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).