I worked for many years on textbooks—big books with several authors each, lots of moving parts, technical editors working alongside designers and manuscript editors and illustrators. I recall an evening when a group of us were reviewing changes to proofs for an especially complex science book—changes that really ought not to have been happening that close to the pub date. At one point, the production manager (who'd been working on books like this for the better part of three decades) leaned over to me and said, "I wish we could go back to the day when every change weighed several pounds."

His point was that the process needed an external constraint; something that would force us to just ship the damn thing. But the weight analogy sticks: we talk of edits to a text as being either "heavy" or "light," recalling the lead type that was once necessary to make them. The physical weight may be gone—displaced by word processors and infinitely light pixels—but that mental heaviness persists.

As does the idea of a fixed, crystallized, final work. Even our digital systems mimic the immutableness of ink on paper. Typos and egregious errors are routinely repaired in online texts, but rarely are "heavier" changes made. Ebooks can be updated, but only dumbly: a new file will wipe out annotations made to an earlier version, and no useful convention yet exists for communicating what was changed and why. Our content management systems know of only two states—draft and published—either privately in progress or publicly neglected. Nowhere is there a third state—in the world, but still evolving.

But perhaps there should be. What kept us working late on that science textbook (and often in the case of books like this) was new science: a discovery, which—if verified—would render the book out of date even before it went to print. But verification would take time, and the Fall semester loomed around the corner. We couldn't wait to send the book to print; nor could we blindly make changes based on the results of a single study.

I don't recall exactly what compromise we came to that night; I think we inserted a brief caveat and moved on, since few other options presented themselves. But what if it could have been different? What if the book we released were entirely digital, making the expense of a print run obsolete? And what if we could push updates to students and professors as the science happened, rather than waiting for the seemingly interminable two- or three-year editions cycle to pass. And—perhaps most interestingly—what if students could read the text and dive into these changes. Rather than learning from a (literally and figuratively) dead-tree text, they could learn from a living document.

Science writing very obviously benefits from this approach, but I don't think it's the only case. How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you've never done this yourself, you've certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?

Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.

Writing has (so far) not generally benefited from this kind of process; but now that the text has been fully liberated from the tyranny of the printing press, we are presented with an opportunity: to deploy texts, instead of merely publishing them.

What does this mean in practice? It means working as close to the text as possible (the markup) so as to revise quickly and efficiently. It means designing systems for communicating a document's history in a way that's illustrative rather than overwhelming. It means building tools that permit us to evolve a text over time, adding bits of metadata that illuminate the process along the way.

And it means letting go of that weight, which now lives solely in our heads. Instead of weight, let's think of depth: revisions that are either deep or shallow, measured in time and effort rather than pounds. And furthermore, let's think about the reading experience as one of depth as well: superficial (only the latest version) or exhaustive (all the way down). In doing so we not only improve our own writing, and provide a richer reading experience; we also expose the craft of writing and editing for others to learn from.

Of course, we lose some things, too. Permanence, stability. What Elizabeth Eisenstein, in The printing press as an agent of change, called typographical fixity. But where fixity enabled us to become better readers, can iteration make us better writers? If a text is never finished, does it demand our contribution? Fixity is important if you deem the text the end; but perhaps instead the text is now a means—to our own writing, our own thinking. Perhaps it is time for the margins to swell to the same size as the text.

In the second part of my Contents article, I argued content people (editors in particular) need to know markup. If you've been designing or developing websites for a while, then you're already familiar with web standards' key tenet: the separation of content from presentation. If you are coming from other fields (say, journalism or old-school publishing), let me explain.

In print, the designer has a certain tyranny over the page. She sets the text, and the reader has no choice but to accept that design. The content (i.e., the text) and its presentation (the typefaces and layout) are inextricably linked.

On the web, the designer again sets the text, but this time her choices are not immutable. The reader (or his device) can modify those designs as needed. For example, he can set the font size to be larger in his browser, or he can specify a font that he feels is more comfortable. He can load the page on an iPhone where the text is reformatted for a smaller screen; or he can use a screenreader to read the words aloud, ignoring the visual styles entirely. The content and its presentation are related, but that relationship is tenuous, easy to break.

This is what we might call a very, very good thing. It means the text is more accessible—to different devices and (most importantly) different kinds of people. It means the reader has more power over the text than the designer has (as it should be). And it confers a great deal of flexibility on the text itself: freed from presentational concerns, it can be read in any number of contexts or devices. The design can change, and the content will continue to work as intended.

This marks a shift in what an editor's markup does: because a lot of pen-on-paper markup was presentational. Noting wrong fonts, inserting hair spaces, setting in bold, etc., were common reasons to markup a text when working in print. Now that content and presentation are separate, however, markup takes on another dimension: not instructions for style, but defining the underlying semantic meaning of the text, such that any number of visual styles can be intelligently devised.

What does this mean in practice? It means instead of noting that a heading should be larger, you mark it as an <h2>--a second-level heading in the article's hierarchy. Instead of requesting that some text be indented, you mark it as a <blockquote>, indicating the text is an excerpt. And so on: in every case, you concern yourself with the meaning of the text, not how it looks.

Think about that for just a minute, and it becomes clear that this is a much better way of doing things. Visual styles (as important as they are) are always in service to the meaning of the text. Working with markup on the web brings you closer to that meaning.

Alas, many of the tools we use to author content for the web continue to reflect the old, print-based perspective. WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get") document editors impose a presentational view of the text, with little regard for its meaning. Worse, they frequently produce sloppy or incorrect markup (often hiding this dirty work from you), preferring the facade of visual styles to the underlying reality.

It's time content people of all stripes recognized the WYSIWYG editor for what it really is: not a convenient shortcut, but a dangerous obstacle placed between you and the actual content. Because content on the web is going to be marked up one way or another: you either take control of it or you cede it to the software, but you can't avoid it. WYSIWYG editors are fine for amateurs, but if you are an editor, or copywriter, or journalist, or any number of the kinds of people who work with content on the web, you cannot afford to be an amateur.

Fortunately, there's a plus side to all this: HTML is easy to learn. Even if you never peeked at the source for a website, never so much as authored an anchor tag, you already know most of the principles behind it, because they emerged from the texts themselves. You do need to learn a new syntax—a new way of expressing what the text means. But syntax is where editors excel.

One of the principles of HTML's development as a language is "pave the cowpaths"; meaning, look at how people are already doing things, and adopt those methods, rather than trying something wholly new. Many of HTML's original cowpaths were paved by writers and editors, long before the web arrived. Paragraphs, headings, blockquotes, articles, ordered and unordered lists, and so on, all emerged from age-old ways of working with text. Now new cowpaths are being paved on the web itself, and we need the people who love the text the most to get involved in where we go. We need you.

In the first part of my essay in Contents, I argued that to be a publisher today you must belong to a community. It's through the act of belonging that you can understand how your readers think and what they want (and need) to read. And, just as importantly, it allows you to connect with your readers in a way that transcends any particular platform or business model; a valuable stance at a time when the business of content is in the midst of a transition, and none of us can predict what's on the other side.

But there's a point just a few steps beyond belonging that is perhaps even more important: advocating. Belonging to a community means participating, observing, and generally being in attendance (either physically or virtually). But being an advocate requires stepping forward and helping to articulate that community's needs, or advance their interests, or—when necessary—protect their rights. You need to both amplify and clarify the values of a community, not merely share them.

In practice, this means identifying what your community needs to prosper, and either providing that directly or advocating for its provisioning. There are many ways to do this. You can lobby for changes the community needs (e.g., by publishing content illustrating those needs and defining how change should happen); you can facilitate discussions (e.g., by hosting and supporting safe, productive forums); you can challenge the status quo (e.g., by bringing in ideas from outside the community and fostering discussion); and so on. It means acknowledging that your content is a means to an end, and making sure the ends are good ones.

It also means making hard choices, because advocacy isn't always in the interest of your business. Especially in today's SEO and ad-laden world, publishing only that which serves your community is unlikely to be the fastest way to a dollar. Content that is superficially sensational or contrary (but actively harmful) can bring more pageviews; while content that smartly challenges the ideas or values of a community (i.e., encourages rigor) can draw ire. You have to be able to look past the short-term risks to see what years of trust and support are worth.

More importantly, advocacy is one of the ways in which a publisher remains relevant in a world where the only obstacles to publishing are a reasonably fast internet connection and skill with a keyboard. By filtering and developing the best content—with an eye to how it benefits your readers—a publisher can simultaneously spread ideas both within and without a community. You can strengthen your readers' ties with one another, and improve their lot in the rest of the world all at once. Think about that, and you can begin to see a much more compelling vision of the publisher of the future: not a gateway, but a representative.

I've come around, slowly (cf. stubborn, above). But I'll confess it wasn't until Ethan started talking about responsive web design that my reform was complete. Because prior to hearing about his framework, I saw fluid design as almost wholly in opposition to the proportions and grids that make design pleasing: I found it nigh impossible to imagine an approach for design in which the beauty of good typography could persist without erecting walls to protect its territory—without ensuring a solid, fixed foundation. As Ethan handily demonstrates in Responsive Web Design, I was wrong: beautiful, typographically rich designs can emerge from flexible roots. Moreover, they should do so; the web is not print, and letting go of the control we used to have, while embracing the beauty of the new medium, is something we must all do, sooner or later.

And Ethan shows us how: not content to merely address the technical requirements of responsive web design, he also delves deep into how we need to think about web design today, what with the web in your pocket and your TV and everywhere in between. An inveterate storyteller, he shows how he arrived at his methods, thereby making them available to us all. Moreover, his writing is also as hilarious as his designs are lovely. (It's nearly enough to make you hate him.)

It's been my privilege to edit all of the A Book Apart titles, and none more so than this one: Ethan's technical chops combine with a witty and clever writing style to make a book that's both fun and educational. At only 150 pages, its brevity means you can read, laugh, and get back to work—quickly, because the book is far too inspiring to keep you away from your desk for long. Coming as it does after Erin Kissane’s book it establishes another design principle in our list: that of designing for the content before the screen size, recognizing that it is the former that is most important to our users, while the latter continues to diverge.

Responsive Web Design is available now; joining it later this year will be excellent books from Aarron Walter, Luke Wroblewski, and our own Jason Santa Maria. With each new book, the entire list gets better; I can't wait to see what the next books will teach me.

When I first moved to New York, I ordered the Sunday Post to be delivered every week. For me, "the Post" was synonymous with "The News"—I couldn't imagine getting the news from anywhere else. On Sunday mornings, I pored through the entire paper with a pot of coffee at my side. I only relinquished that ritual after discovering that getting a paper delivered in Brooklyn meant rising at 6:00 am to pluck it from the news boy's fingers; by sunrise, any paper left on the stoop had vanished.

Since then my news reading habits have gone through several more revisions: first, to reading exclusively online, then gradually switching to the New York Times, not only owing to the fact that New York was my new hometown, but also because the Times web experience was and remains vastly superior to that of the Post. I no longer read only during the morning's coffee or on a brief subway ride, but rather check in at all hours of the day. And as my love for the news has deepened, my appetite has grown to include all manner of other sources—ProPublica, Democracy Now, TalkingPointsMemo, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and countless blogs.

Meanwhile, I've grown more particular about the kind of news I want. I want a reading experience that defends the news from the circus that online advertising creates. I want good storytelling and analysis, not naked facts. I want news that admits and defends its point of view (and acknowledges that there is a truth to be uncovered), not news that parrots the party line while making claims to objectivity. I want long essays on the events at Fukushima and the consequences for nuclear power going forward, not shrieking dispatches of each new fire or setback. I want a history of American engagement in Libya, putting the events of the past few weeks in context. I want twenty thousand words on the recession and its effects on the middle class, not another lone statistic about the unemployment rate. I want thoughtful, investigative journalism that exposes the ways in which our government is failing us, so that we can make it better.

And I am willing to pay for it. The news is expensive; this much we have always known. Thousands of reporters, researchers, fact-checkers, copyeditors, production managers, photographers, web developers, designers—not to mention boots on the ground in perilous, hard to reach locations—are required to bring the news to my desk every day, and I know full well that each of those people must be paid to do the work that they do. I donate to ProPublica, I gave to TPM's fundraising drives back when they were just a few people in Josh Marshall's living room, I voluntarily pay more than is required for Readability—and yet I remain deeply ambivalent about paying for the Times. Why?

First, I resent the pay structure that the Times proposes: it is vastly cheaper for me to subscribe to the Sunday paper (a habit long ago abandoned) than to read the news on all my various devices. I can think of no other reason for this strategy than to protect the already dwindling print subscription model; as such, the paywall is a tactic for the way down—a means to temporarily sustain a business that is destined to fail eventually. I find it difficult to fund a ship when its own captain admits that it's sinking.

Moreover, the Times paywall does not map to my reading behavior. I don't read a single source for the news—I read thousands. I consume the news from all directions—from venerable institutions like the Times, to blogs that obsess over particular topics, to tweets from witnesses, and every imaginable source in between. I want news that is the aggregate of all these sources, that admits all of these varying (and often contrary) perspectives. Erecting paywalls between these locations misunderstands the ecosystem that each story participates in. The value I find in the news today is in its connectedness—in the ways in which often divergent sources come together to create a story—not its solitary authority.

The Times response to this is a porous paywall—what some have called a pay "fence," either disparagingly or encouragingly I cannot tell. But I find the rules around how many articles you can view (and under which conditions) far too convoluted for most people to parse. People—myself included—frequently part with their money on the web, but only when it's easy. If iTunes has taught us anything, it's that easy beats free. For the Times to have spent two years working on a payment mechanism and missed that lesson does not bode well.

Similarly, the high price of their subscriptions seems to stem from the assumption that they will be the sole paper anyone subscribes to; they have presumed their position as paper of record. But the very concept of a paper of record no longer fits: there can be no singular story in a system of communication as diverse as the internet. In fact, it would be irresponsible of me to get my news from just one source. I still can't forgive the Times for their negligent coverage of WMDs in the lead up to the Iraq War; but more importantly, I can't forgive all the people who read only the Times and assumed that was all they needed to know. The world we live in is far too complicated, and the consequences of these decisions far too great, to trust the news from a single institution—even one as routinely great as the Times.

So what does this new world of news look like? It looks like Instapaper, or Readability, or perhaps Flipboard, if Flipboard can learn how to aggregate information in a way that makes sense. It looks like 1-Click, or Kickstarter, or Amazon's singles. It looks like tools for making timelines or managing primary sources. It looks like dispatches from people on the ground. It looks like startups we haven't seen yet, because a few smart people (perhaps exiles from newsroom layoffs) are right at this moment looking at the reactions to the Times and starting to plan for how they can do better. It's both dispersed and connected, social but not inane, reliable and diverse. It looks like many things, because there isn't going to be a single way forward; the future is, as ever, more complicated than the past.

It's impossible to recognize a tipping point until it's behind you, but I suspect that we may be able to look back and see something shift right around now—see the point at which the way we read broke ranks with the way the news is made. We are no longer monogamous readers, loyal to a single source; rather, we read voraciously, looking for patterns, teasing out the things that matter to us, making connections, and then (often) writing about them ourselves. We are consumers of news, not The News.

I may yet pay for the Times, but I will do so only to demonstrate my willingness to pay for quality journalism, whatever the source. I'm following the path of the readers, confident that there are those among the reporters and editors and fact-checkers who will find a way to join us—confident that in the system of capitalism we have yoked ourselves to, we can find a way to support readers and writers. My money is on the table, for whoever can reach it.

As advertising has moved from print to web, it has not followed a single path. The classifieds have gone from the back pages of your local paper to Craigslist. The personals have migrated over to dating networks like Ok Cupid. Display ads remain, but in addition to publishers, they also serve ecommerce and aggregation sites. Search ads have cropped up to fill the spaces in between.

In the mean time, the overall price of advertising has dropped, such that current online advertising spending seems unlikely to ever reach the heights of the print era: in large part because online readers are more distracted than ever before—with ever more content from ever more sources to consume—and so not as susceptible to the advertisers’ siren call.

At the same time, the ads themselves, freed from the relative stasis of ink on paper, have emerged into the world of pixels determined to take advantage of their newfound freedom. They commit horrors their print brethren could only dream of, leaping from the sidebar and dancing across the text, flinging themselves between reader and words without care for either, stalking us as we scroll down the page, taking over backgrounds as if they were the very material on which the web is made. The more we ignore them, the more brazen they become. This kind of advertising so fully disrespects the writing beneath it that reading becomes abhorrent: the kind of experience we should all avoid or get done with quickly, rather than immerse ourselves into.

Likewise the design of these pages has come to serve the needs of the advertisers instead of the readers. The basic principles of good reading design—whitespace, an appropriate measure, considered typography—are not only absent, they are actively violated. We design pages for clicks—for movement from place to place—neglecting the fact that reading is an act of stillness. We intentionally distract, polluting the visual space until it resembles less a library than Times Square. And to add insult to injury, we cover up these ills by saying people don’t read online—as if the design of a space played no part in determining its use.

And yet, people do read online. They read more than they ever did. They even read long articles, and straight to the end. They read one article after the other. They crave reading in the quiet moments of the day—waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus, enjoying a glass of wine before their date arrives at the bar. They read while walking down the street; they read at their desk in between tasks; they buy devices that permit them to carry more words than they ever could before—and with those devices in hand they read more and more.

Along the way, they’ve started to demand a better reading experience. One that respects the basic tenets of good typography; one more portable and designed especially for them—not for advertisers or search engines. Instapaper’s immense popularity represents this corner of the reading market: a small, but growing, number of readers who care so much about the experience of reading they are willing to pay to make it better.

And that’s where Readability comes along. The implicit premise in the new Readability is that readers are willing to pay for what they read—that we see its intrinsic value. At the same time, it offers a means of payment that is automatic—akin to Amazon’s 1-click, or buying music in iTunes, it removes the friction of payment by centralizing it and obviating the need for us to whip out our credit cards at every turn. And it does all this without erecting paywalls: understanding that it is not the payment that makes paywalls so unattractive, but the wall.

When you subscribe to one (or two) newspapers, and perhaps three or four magazines, traditional payment mechanisms (create an account, provide a billing address and credit card number, etc.) are perfectly fine. You do them a few times a year and then that’s it; they renew automatically (to publishers’ great benefit), and you hardly notice what you’re paying. But on the web—where you might read a dozen newspapers a day, or hundreds of blogs and magazines over the course of a month, that model simply doesn’t scale.

Our reading experience has become voracious and dispersed, and it needs new payment mechanisms that serve this behavior rather than hinder it.

Readability’s model—a centralized subscription that is automatically distributed among the publications you read—is the first step towards this new system. It is likely not the last; like any good product on the web, it is an iteration from previous models, and it will continue to develop as readers and publishers use it. Taken in combination with other efforts—boutique advertising networks that serve demure ads in return for an influential audience, old-fashioned sponsorships that resemble the radio interruptions of yore, membership drives, and patronage models—it is a promising addition to an economy that values reading more than pageviews.

Moreover, it is an opportunity for readers to vote—with their cash—for a better reading experience on the web. Even readers who are skeptical that it will raise enough money should participate, inasmuch as it publicly and financially demonstrates your hope for the future: a web designed for reading, not a web where reading happens despite the design. No reader can argue with that.

But publishing, while far from dead, has not moved in one great big step from the world of ink and trees to that of pixels and tablets. Many small, sometimes halting, sometimes diverging paths are being followed, more or less simultaneously and with fascinating results. Digital publishing, it turns out, isn't so much a second print run (as it seemed at first) as a whole other ecosystem, with a unique atmosphere, strange new rain patterns, and its own troubling signs of pollution and climate change. Diving into it means learning how to breathe all over again.

And so it turns out that the editorial process--the cornerstone of traditional publishing--is still relevant but no longer sufficient. It needs its cousins in marketing more than ever (and they are learning new tricks as well), it needs wayfinding several steps beyond the most complex bookstore signage, it needs governance in addition to distribution, and distribution has evolved into something more like attention, which it turns out is much more difficult than checking the levels of cyan as the pages come off press. It needs the both-new-and-old field of content strategy to bring the wealth of our experience from these disparate histories onto our desks (and before the deadline, please).

This is why the publication of our third book—The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane—is so fiercely satisfying. Not only is it an outstanding addition to our list—and, I believe, as relevant to those working inside the field of content strategy as those adjacent to it—but it addresses a topic near and dear to my heart, and it does so brilliantly and beautifully. Moreover, it evangelizes the shared value system that got most of us into the content world in the first place, and the sight of which can be hard to lose among the late nights and the coffee and that blinding blank page.

I've always loved the tradition of referring to a publisher as a house—a home, a place with a kitchen and a hearth, closets full of manuscripts, reading rooms, good company, and a well-stocked bar. The first three titles from A Book Apart display what we believe to be important about the web: clean, semantic markup; delightful, progressive designs; and smart, sustainable content. We have not yet exhausted these topics (nor, do I suspect, will we ever), but I do believe we have created a solid foundation on which to continue publishing on these, and related, themes. The walls are up; now let's fill them.

Right now, ebooks are a byproduct of paper books; the distribution and publishing process is identical, while the reading experience differs only slightly. The current crop of ebooks takes advantage of the digital format in as much as they permit you to carry more of them around than you could before; but other elements of the medium—the "hyper" part of hypertext—are noticeably absent.

Let's presume that won't last, that books will evolve to be native to the web. (Craig Mod shows us the way forward.) But if the book morphs from ink on paper to HTML (as I hope it does) what then will distinguish it from other kinds of writing? How will a book be different than a blog? Do we need to distinguish it at all?

When I first started blogging, I told myself it was ok to post half-formed thoughts; a blog was ephemeral, reactive—the medium cared not so much about completeness as about timeliness. I still believe that to be true, but with one important modification: it's not that a blog post has permission to be rough so much as that roughness is its natural state. Meaning, blogging encourages exploration and experimentation. In this way, blogging is the kind of writing authors have done for centuries but which usually remained hidden away.

On the contrary, a book is the culmination of this writing: it's what emerges after years of scratching around the same topic, when all the little pieces start to come together. Where the blog suggests paths, the book draws conclusions. Neither is superior to the other; rather, they represent different modes of writing—the first expansive, the latter convergent. Each mode suggests and learns from the other. And this is why, even if the form of the book perishes, the writing therein may survive—even if it happens on a blog.

On many an occasion, I've spoken with someone about their reluctance to get a tattoo and heard something to the effect of "I can't imagine making a decision that would last forever." My somewhat cheeky response has always been to say it won't last forever; it will only last as long as you do, which is to say, not very long at all. But most of the time, and for most people, "forever" is that piece of time that we can see with our own eyes. Forever is the length of a single, human life.

Such a definition could be unfavorably referred to as myopic; defining forever as the span of our own lives disrespects the lives around and after us. (I'm convinced that many of the people who deny climate change suffer from an inability to imagine that the world will go on without them.) But it is hard to argue with a time span built of our own biology. And, perhaps when it comes to our collective cultural memory, a single life is long enough: long enough, that is, for the next generation to pick up the torch.

This, I believe, is why a book feels permanent, even though enough libraries have burned over the centuries that we ought to know better. A well-made book, stored upright, in a dry, dark place, will survive a hundred years—that is, a lifetime. More if it is especially well printed, and only carefully handled, but a hundred years is a safe bet. Plenty of time to read it as a child, hold onto it through adolescence and adulthood, and then give it to your first great-grandchild. That's as much forever as any of us can reasonably conceive.

By this measure, the printed book lasts forever, but the digital book—as yet—does not. A cast iron pan, properly cared-for, will last forever; a cheap aluminum pan may not. A well-crafted chair, loved by its owner, will last forever; an allen-wrench constructed Ikea chair will not. Forever, then, is defined by the presence of two unique but necessary components: the physical ability to survive one hundred years (give or take a few), and the presence of a caretaker.

On the former, our digital artifacts are at a disadvantage. Technology changes fast enough that we can't safely say that a file format that is popular today will work a decade or more in the future, let alone ten decades. But I suspect the latter point—the presence of a caretaker—to be more important here. Technology cannot march along on its own; it needs willing participants. And if, as participants in that technology, we assert our role as caretakers of our cultural memory, then it cannot move on without us.

This is, admittedly, an idealistic stance. But Irish monks saved Western Christian thought with little more than ink and paper, and we have a few more tools at our disposal. Backup systems intended to save us from technological failure can also rescue files from the capricious acts of an organization like Yahoo. Opportunities for new organizations--those who care about archival quality—abound. APIs mean the skilled among us can find ways to duplicate content, storing it in as many different places as possible. Faster connections and more bandwidth mean we can share files with others, appointing them to take over for us should our own lives be tragically cut short. And there are those among us sounding the call that we neglect our role as caretakers at our own peril.

This is not to excuse Yahoo's behavior, nor is it to say that we will be able to save everything, even if our efforts are heroic. But no civilization has ever saved everything; acknowledging that fact does not obviate the need to try and save as much as we can. The technological means to produce an archive are not beyond our skills; sadly, right now at least, the will to do so is insufficient. Let's hope that doesn't last forever.

But the digital bookshelf has removed that restriction: a slim book can garner as much or more attention as a long one. A book is no longer evaluated in the hand, but rather via the screen, where its size is invisible. And a growing preference for short form has made books of two or three hundred pages seem long by comparison.

Amazon has astutely identified this new market and made plans to sell to it; but where they go wrong is in the pricing. They assume that a shorter book should necessarily be cheaper. But when did we start pricing books according to page count? Why should a book that saves you time cost less?

Writing short requires focus. Instead of making three arguments, make one really good one; rather than sharing a handful of anecdotes, share the most memorable one. Most good writers know that writing short means first writing long, then identifying the weak areas and ruthlessly cutting them; after which the shards that remain must be carefully pieced back together, and (often) the cutting repeated. Too many people stop after merely writing long, and so the work never earns the clarity this process creates.

Don't get me wrong: I love long form writing, and I know I'm not alone. But many a book has been forced to fill the requisite two hundred pages when it would have been better off at half or even a quarter of that length. (Michael Pollan’s Unhappy Meals made for a fabulous essay, but stretching it to fit the book form did little to improve it.) The precision that is evident in the short form is often lost when the text grows longer, and that precision makes a short text more valuable, not less.

Moreover, I believe our growing preference towards short form is not only the result of our famously declining attention spans, but also of our increasing desire to read: the longer the reading list, the more impatient I am with writing that doesn't get to the point. And when good writing is in abundance, I only want to read the very best of it. If you care about your craft, then write me a short letter—I'll pay more for it.