3D Image in Books

In class this week when Alan was discussing authors who were experimenting with the form of books, I immediately thought of Felix J. Palma’s novel The Map of the Sky. The inside covers at the front and back of this book have 3D images illustrating aliens attacking London. When I bought this book in hardcover, it included a pair of 3D glasses so that the reader can see the pictures correctly. Unsurprisingly, I lost the glasses a few days after purchasing the book, and am now the proud owner of a book with 3D images that are useless and just look blurry. I personally found that the addition of these images to the form of Palma's book encouraged me to buy the novel, but did not affect the way I interacted with the books content.

Thus while this is a great book, and I highly encourage everyone to take a look at Felix J. Palma’s novels, I wonder who made the final decision to include 3D images in the book’s design. The images are beautiful, but they are a little bit useless in the long run. By the time the reader reaches the point in the plot the pictures are depicting, they have probably lost the flimsy 3D glasses that were included in the purchase of the book; which is what happened to me. Really the inclusion of 3D images in this book perplexes me, and thanks to the discussions in class, raise more questions concerning form and meaning than I considered when I first read The Map of the Sky. 

I have a lot of questions about the addition of 3D images to the form of Palma's book. Are these images meant effect the reader's interaction with the plot and text of the book? When the book comes out in paperback, will the 3D images be included? If the book is rented from a library in hardcover and the 3D glasses are not included, will the reader even recognize that the images are meant to be 3D? What was the original intent of the author concerning the 3D images? If the images could not be included in the digitization of the text, would their absence alter the reader's initial interaction with the book's content and form? 

Therefore while these 3D images add an interesting obstacle to the digitization of the book, just as we discussed this week in class, they did not change the way I interacted with the book's content. In the end, the form of the images in The Map of the Sky struck me as an interesting way to grab the initial attention of a reader.