AustLit

'When a full account of the rise and fall of the printed book is written, the year 2010 will be seen as a turning point. It had become clear to even a mildly interested observer that the book as physical object was under siege. To read long-text books and journal or news articles, many people were turning to tablets and e-books; even I had begun to read Dickens novels on an iPad. But the picture book was mounting a powerful defensive skirmish. Lane Smith’s It’s a Book! appeared in the US, with cartoon animals asking ‘Do you scroll down? Does it need a password? No, it’s a book!’, a reminder that, as Adam Gopnik wrote about it,’what books do depends on the totality of what they are’. In Australia, where picture books have for decades been both innovative and respected, books without words were among leaders of the charge. The Picture Book of the Year award in 2010 went to Gregory Rogers’ wordless The Hero of Little Street; three years earlier the winner had been Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, an album of 128 pages, with nary a word except for some signs in an invented language.'