The world of book publishing hasn’t been immune to the march of technology. Ebooks (which now account for around one in five book sales in the USA), audiobooks and self-publishing have all dragged the written word into the digital age. But when it comes to field guides, what’s old is still new, with the timeless ‘technologies’ of pencil, paint and paper remaining at the forefront of the genre.
The Compact Australian Bird Guide was released by CSIRO this month, with the pocket-sized field guide featuring more than 700 hand-drawn and painted Australian bird species. It’s a painstaking and exact process that requires years of work — the Compact Guide’s forerunner, the larger-format The Australian Bird Guide, was a nine-year project — but one that the principal artist for the two guides, Jeff Davies, says computer-generated imagery hasn’t yet been able to supplant.
“The brush and the pencil and the tools have evolved to be perfect for the job,” he says. “How
