IGP 2017 — Questão 31 · Vocabulário

Instrução: As questões de números 31 a 35 referem-se ao texto abaixo.

How real books have trumped ebooks

1. Books have always had a fetishistic quality to them, with their dusty secretiveness. Now,
2. though, it feels like we’re living through a special moment in the history of book design and
3. beautiful books are everywhere.
4. Book covers looked very different a decade ago when the _________ of e-readers seemed to
5. flummox a publishing industry reeling from the financial crisis and Amazon’s rampant colonisation
6. of the market. Publishers responded to the threat of digitisation by making physical books that
7. were as grey and forgettable as ebooks. It was an era of flimsy paperbacks and Photoshop covers,
8. the publishers’ lack of confidence manifest in the shonkiness of the objects they were producing.
9. But after reaching a peak in 2014, sales of e-readers and ebooks have slowed and hardback
10. sales have surged. The latest figures from the Publishing Association showed ebook sales falling
11. 17% in 2016, with an 8% rise in their physical counterparts. At the same time, publishers’
12. production values have soared and bookshops have begun to fill up with books with covers of
13. jewel-like beauty, often with __________ textured pages. As the great American cover designer
14. Peter Mendelsund put it to me, books have “more cloth, more foil, more embossing, page staining,
15. sewn bindings, deckled edges”.
16. James Daunt, chief executive of Waterstones, contends that the resurgence of the physical
17. book is real and ___________. Furthermore, a focus on the book as object of desire has been
18. central to his turnaround of Waterstones. This has not only seen the firm return to profit, but has
19. made the shops, once dim grey halls of cheap paperbacks, ziggurats of three for twos and
20. mountains of celebrity cookbooks, things of beauty in themselves, as cleverly curated and
21. carefully atmospheric as Daunt’s eponymous London bookshops. “A very large part of the way I
22. sell books has been about how you present them, how you bring the customer to them and exploit
23. the tactile sense of a physical book. We’ve changed the furniture at Waterstones to make that
24. happen. We have smaller tables with more focused displays. Everything is aimed at persuading
25. people to pick things up, trying to catch their eye, making bookshops a place where you discover
26. beautiful things.”
27. Daunt doesn’t feel that the current vogue for beautiful books is anything new, but, rather, a
28. return to the values that existed in a previous publishing era. After the financial crash, he says,
29. “there was some cost-cutting and shortsighted penny-pinching that went on, trying to boost profit
30. margins by cutting back on production values, and I think publishers realised that consumers
31. needed a reason to go to bookshops. And that was to buy proper books with decent paper and
32. decent design. We’ve seen a clear relationship between books that were successful and books
33. that looked nice and had been made well. So it then became a commercial imperative to do it.”
34. Covers are enigmatic, un-pindownable things, often as much a work of creative inspiration as
35. the books themselves. Mitzi Angel, publisher at Faber, says: “A good designer interprets the
36. writing alongside the editor. Sometimes, a brilliant, unexpected cover can provide the publishing
37. house with exactly the right way to conceive of a book. It can be a light-bulb moment. You think
38. to yourself, ‘Ah! NOW I know how to publish this.’”
39. Whether the physical book goes the way of the hand-illuminated manuscript, an object of
40. merely historical interest for all its beauty, or whether this ancient piece of technology is here to
41. stay, we should all be celebrating the work of the designers and publishers who have responded
42. to the gauntlet thrown down by ebooks with such aplomb. We should also recognise that the most
43. beautiful books of the last few years have also been some of the most brilliant and inspired. The
44. care and attention lavished on those intricately illuminated medieval volumes said something
45. important about what was written inside them, the value of the words within, and this is no less
46. true today.

(Adapted from: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/14/how-real-books-trumped-ebooks-publishing-revival)

Mark the alternative that correctly and respectively fills in the blanks (l.04, l.13 and l.17) of the text.