Illustration student Rachel Walsh was assigned a seemingly impossible design task by her professor: explain the concept of the Amazon Kindle to Charles Dickens. Her solution is ingenious, and applies just as well to iBooks, but just imagine if she’d been asked to explain the iPad to Dickens instead.
Rachel accomplished her task by hollowing out a hardback book and filling it with a 40 separate panes. Inside each of these ensconcements, she fit a miniature version of some of Charles Dickens’ favorite books.
“I made the book start to finish over five days, and it took about 35 hours to make I reckon. It was pretty painstaking cutting out all the gaps in the book itself, and making the books to go inside. They’re all bound like actual books, so as I waited for them to glue and dry I would design the covers for them. All the covers are copies of real book covers. They include many of Dickens’s novels, his favorite childhood books, and some of my own,” said Rachel.
This is really neat, but imagine if she’d tried to explain the iPad instead. Instead of just filling it with books, each separate window could have held something new. Inside one, a book. Inside another, a small barometer. A wind-up clock. A chess piece. A small locket containing the image of a loved one. A tiny musicbox. A small magnifying glass. And so on. She could fill each window with as many different things as she could imagine.
What would you put in those windows to explain the iPad to Dickens? Let us know in the comments.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
8 responses to “This Is How You Explain iBooks To Charles Dickens”
The Apple fan’s explanation:
(Points to Samsung Galaxy Tab in a book)
“It’s ten times better than that!”
The Naysayer’s explanation:
(Points to iPod Touch in a book)
“It is three times bigger”
Note: I am the first one!
This is beautiful. I like your ideas on how to explain the iPad, but can you imagine the little window where you have to explain Safari? My imagination is not so wide as to even conceive the possibilities.
You’re idea of filling each nook with a different device is a great idea, but the iPad is more alchemical: it morphs, fullscreen, into whatever device you choose. I can’t think of a good analog analogy for that, unfortunately.
Just insert a miniature globe!