10 Membranes

» Radiohead again prove they get the implications of digital

Last year I gave a talk at the printers, Clays. Rather than tell them their business was in terminal decline, I said that there was always a future for print books, and in an age of digital delivery premium books would have a greater value. 

Hardbacks would become limited edition special editions, boxed and embossed and coloured in exciting, rare new ways. The material, collectable, craftmanship of the book would come to the fore. It was up to them to push the bounds of printing technology, workflow and conception to propose new tricks to publishers production departments to (re)inject value into print, to make the most of materiality. 

Radiohead have now done this for a second time. This, coupled with their split from EMI and the canny use of pre-order, prove that they have understood both the dynamic of ownership, the price economy of the web, the unrestricted nature of information flows and the self-empowerment of auto-distribution entailed by the digital environment.