(no subject)

[which_chick]

Is it just me, or is this something that would be a LOT more fun if it were a DVD instead of a book? I feel like emailing the author and going "Great idea, wrong medium."

I mean, hell, it's a book about television commercials. How can you discuss things you can't see? It'd be fairly easy to make a DVD, instead. The format would be something like intro the material, show the commercial, plain. Provide some voiceover commentary on the commercial, showing it again, more slowly, with football circles-n-arrows to highlight interesting parts of the thing. Add more discussion, pausing the action if needed. Wrap up voiceover, lead in to the next one, hopefully one that is thematically similar or different or related in some way to the previous, sort of chained events (3-Chain!). That would be so damn cool. I would buy a DVD like that. Why did they make it a book?

Comments

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Who buys coffee-table books? I sure as hell don't. Do you?

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Not usually. I did end up buying Interior Desecrations, but that was just because it made me laugh my ass off.

I think coffee-table books are generally bought by people with coffee tables. I really, really don't have space in my apartment for a coffee table.

Yeah, I did go and get that damnable free lj account.

Mitch H.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I have two coffee tables. One is in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed, because I moved it out of the living room when I had the stove put in last summer. I haven't gotten around to moving it back yet. The other is sort of against the wall between the kitchen and the dining area. It's got stuff piled on it.

Next to the couch, I have a small, metal milking stool (like for milking cows) where I put my coffee. It isn't big enough for a coffee-table book.

My main objection to coffee table books is that they have a disappointing text-to-picture ratio.

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

I don't think it counts as a coffee table unless you're actually using it as one - ie, sitting in between chairs and/or couches. elsewise, they're just really low-slung sidetables.

The whole point of a coffee table book is that it's something for your guests to quickly skim while waiting for you to do whatever it is that you do to finish preparations for entertaining them. You know - brew coffee, haul out the munchies, hide the bodies, sharpen your tools, balance your chequebook...

Now that I think on it, most "artbooks" sold to fans are essentially coffee table books. Lots of big, splashy color pictures, with tiny, dense little wads of text in the margins or corners of the compositions, and a pile of text in the back of the book, where no-body will ever get too, because here comes Joe Fan with the Cheetos and Mountain Dew. Import artbooks are, in a sense, perfect coffee-table books, because the marginal text is essentially unreadable for the average guest - they aren't going to get engrossed in the finicky details of the marginalia, because it's in a foreign language.