André J. Hermann wants his audience to pay for his photography books, not with their money, but with their time. He envisions a world where people go beyond Facebook, Instagram or elsewhere on the Web to view photographs.

Today, most photography begins and ends with digitization: a subject is photographed, the light is turned into digital information, and that information is put on the Internet. But Mr. Hermann wants to take that process a few steps further. His photography begins with those digitized moments and ends with a graspable object, fostering along the way a modest adventure.

For the past two months, he’s been taking his Instagram images, printing them, bundling them into books, and hiding them in nooks and crannies around San Francisco. He’s hidden 16 one-of-a-kind books, and he’ll hide four more over the next few weeks.

Every time he hides one, he posts a photo clue on his blog. So far, all but two have been found.

“I’m challenging people to get up and get out,” Mr. Hermann, 38, said. “Go and see something. It may just take you to a neighborhood you’ve never been to before.”

Mr. Hermann, who recently began teaching at the Academy of Art University after completing a master’s program there three years ago, isn’t antidigital by any means. He has almost 100,000 followers on Instagram, and the photos in the 20 books were taken with his iPhone.

But he said he wanted to remind people that there was more to photography, and life in general, that couldn’t be found with a simple click of a mouse, or the tap of a finger.

“I’ve built this book — I’ve taken the time to sign, number and package it,” he said. “That’s something you get a little of in the digital world — I take the time, and thought, to e-mail it to you — but this is something on a whole other level.”

Mr. Hermann sorts through hundreds of his digital images, selects a couple of dozen and sends them to an online printing service. Then he goes location-scouting.

“I’m walking around looking to hide a book, and all of a sudden I become really paranoid because I think everyone is on to me,” he said. “In the beginning it was horrible,” adding “then I realized no one cares.”

Mr. Hermann usually finds a place that’s not too hard to reach — under some stairs, in an alleyway, in a planter — but further disguises the book by placing trash or a newspaper over it. Then he takes a picture of the scene that serves as a clue for the enterprising thousands who have read his blog.

Mr. Hermann said at first he was nervous no one would find the books, or even bother looking. Those fears were quickly quelled. People were so excited when they found one that they’d take their own pictures, and contact Mr. Hermann to say thanks.

Mr. Hermann says his hidden photo project started as an experiment to see how far people will go to get a unique, personal object. He wanted to know whether, in the digital age, people still appreciated printed materials, and an adventure.

“There’s something much more magical than just going to a bookstore, spending $20, and saying, ‘O.K., I have this book,’ ” he said. “The price you pay now is to take the time to walk and hunt this thing down.”

The fact that people are so far willing to pay that price seems to validate that Mr. Hermann’s initial instinct, that “print is not dead, man.”

Mr. Hermann will be in New York City this August and conduct the same experiment, but with a different set of photos.

He’s confident that though he has a smaller online audience in New York, where people are often too rushed to go out of their way to do anything, he’ll be proved right again.

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