Fergie's Tech Blog

MIT Professor Praises "Big Thinking"

Aaron Ricadela writes in InformationWeek:

MIT professor Michael Hawley thinks big. Hawley masterminded the world's largest book, a mattress-sized color-photo tour of the Himalayan country of Bhutan.

"You don't make progress in baby steps," said Hawley, director of special projects and founder of MIT's GO Expeditions program, in a speech Sunday night at the InformationWeek Fall Conference in Rancho Mirage, Calif. A willingness to settle for mediocrity could hold back technical progress, he said. "We're duct-taping our way through."

Hawley's mentor, Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography, once told him that anything worth doing is worth doing to excess. That's literally true for Hawley's book Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across The Last Himalayan Kingdom, published in late 2003. It weighs 130 pounds, measures 5 by 7 feet, is priced at $15,000, and features 100-plus pages of dazzling color photos of the subsistence-farming country that first got television in 1999. Bhutan was a showcase for new digital photography and printing techniques. Laying out the book "blew holes in every piece of flagship software Adobe [Systems] had," Hawley said. Sales through Amazon.com have ticked up to 100 copies, but "I'd rather sell 100 books to 100 interesting people than deal with a bunch of New York publishers that just want to squeeze royalties our of Harry Potter," Hawley said.

posted by Fergie @ 9/19/2005 05:42:00 PM