An interesting article in the NY Times raises the wonderful question: What do autographs mean in this era of E-Book readers?
It’s a fun question to ponder. Tom Paxton has long joked that autographs are required in order to give a CD its full stereographic and quality sound, yet one year when I (joking) indicated he might need to sign my iPod, he deferred. When our collections of music are all digital, what does this mean for signed album covers? How do we show we’ve heard and seen that artist live—how do we get that visceral connection?
The article explores the issue for books: specifically, those on Kindles and iPads. Yes, you can have the artist sign the back of the device, but that’s not really the same thing (and even with a Sharpie, is likely to wear off). There are apps that permit you to take your picture with the artist, transmit the picture to their eReader and permit the artist to sign it, sending it back. There are others that just take the picture. Of course, as we all know, a picture is only as good as the bits it is made of, which can easily be (cough) Photoshop (cough) redone. The same can’t be said for that Sharpie on the case.
Will a digital signature ever have the same value as an autograph? One hundred years from now, will I be able to sell my email with Barak Obama’s PKI signature? Are digital signatures just emphemera from a collectable point of view?
Yet again, technology is destroying a hobby. First it was stamp collecting, which email is rapidly destroying. Now autographs.
