True book design is a matter of tact (tempo, rhythm, touch) alone.

There's a kind of staccato that emerges from much of our time spent with the screen: 140 character updates, three-sentence emails, single word IMs, texts where the auto-correct has mangled the words, but from which we are still able to discern the writer's intent. We edit from one to another quickly, blithely, barely absorbing what each beep or vibration means before moving on to the next.

So it's no surprise that many of us crave the long text at the end of the day, writing that takes its time, that flows from one sentence to the next, page after page after page. It's this kind of rhythm that emerges from a book, and which remains relevant even as the book moves from paper to pixels.

On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.

In order to create this rhythm, the book must be designed and composed for the screen. A beautiful digital text can no more be arrived at by "converting" from a print design than a beautiful print book can be created by converting a Word file. The digital book will never come into its own so long as it is treated as a byproduct, unworthy of attention.

Furthermore, digital books should no more adhere to identical designs than their print counterparts; different types of writing, different voices and tempos, require unique approaches to design. The current crop of ebook formats were designed for the novel, and on that they do a fine job; but countless other texts—cookbooks, technical books, graphic novels, books on art, plays, verse—are rendered unreadable by that conformity. If the form of the book is changing, it ought to lead to more variety, not less.

Tschichold describes the book designer as one who happily works in obscurity—producing designs that only the select few appreciate, but in that act creating texts that provoke and teach and charm countless readers. Those readers are the designers' only reward, but they are enough. As readers move to the screen, designers who care about reading must follow; not because fame and fortune await—for most, they do not—but because readers still need you. Do not forsake them.

Within the publishing business, I hear talk of "preparing for the future," but I think the phrase is misguided; the future of publishing is not a storm for which we must seal the windows and stock up on canned food. It's not just going to come upon us; we have to create the future we want to unfold.

To that end, I have three announcements to make:

First, I will be joining Jeffrey Zeldman, Erin Kissane, Paul Ford, and Lisa Holton at SXSW for the New Publishing and Web Content panel, where we'll talk about the challenges facing publishers today and explore the intersection of publishing and content strategy. If you'll be in Austin, please stop by and say hello.

Second, this month marked the 300th issue of A List Apart, and my first issue as Contributing Editor. A List Apart has been a successful online magazine for over a decade, and I am exceedingly proud to be on the masthead.

Last but not least, I have also joined forces with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria as an editor for the forthcoming A Book Apart, a new series of brief books for people who make websites. Look for an announcement about our first book very soon.

We tend to think of craft in the tangible things—in the elegant drape of handcrafted fabric, in the smoothness and style of the arm of a chair, in the way a well-made tool eases into the palm and places no burden on the wrist. But I've come to see craft in the intangibles as well—in the rhythm of a well-written sentence, in the exact number of pixels separating two columns, in the lucidity that emerges from an orderly line of code.

In this manner, the web is itself an enormous place for craft—in that every bit of markup or CSS, every decision about font-size or color, every float, and every sentence have within them the opportunity for craft—the chance for the maker (be it the designer or the engineer or the writer) to put more of themselves into it than they have to. The tools have changed—from wood and blade to keyboard and cable—but the craftsmanship is hardly diminished.

It is for this that I am especially excited to be joining Etsy, a place where the craft reaches outward towards the sellers and buyers who make up the community, as well as inwards to the talented people who create a place for that community to flourish. There is craft in all directions, right down to the relationships created when one person connects with another to exchange something of value. Because that too is craft—when you turn away from a nameless, faceless corporation and choose to connect with another human being—that is as much a work of craft as that of the carver who labors to shape the bowl in a perfect wooden spoon.

I am saddened to be leaving Norton, my home for nearly a decade. But they say all good things must come to an end, and inasmuch as Norton has been very good to me, this ending was prefigured. I leave behind an enormously talented group of people who will no doubt continue to publish some of the best books in the business, books I eagerly look forward to reading.

Reading and writing are not discrete activities; they occur on a continuum, with reading at one end, writing at the other. The best readers spend their time somewhere in between.

Reading must occur everyday, but it is not just any daily reading that will do. The day's reading must include at minimum a few lines whose principal intent is to be beautiful—words composed as much for the sake of their composition as for the meaning they convey.

A good reader reads attentively, not only listening to what the writer says, but also to how she says it. This is how a reader learns to write.

If a book bores you, or tells you things you already know, or is not beautiful, do not hesitate to discard it. There are better books awaiting you, just around the bend.

Every book alights a path to other books. Follow these paths as far as you can. This is how you build a library.

A single book struggles to balance on its spine; it pines for neighbors. Keep as many books as you have room for.

Read voraciously, many books at a time. Only then will you hear the conversation taking place among them.

The best library contains both books you have read, and books you have not. The latter should grow in proportion as the library expands. A working library is as much a place for the possible as it is a record of the past.

The only path from here is the misery of barely getting by. Soup kitchens fill empty stomachs, clinics stitch up torn feet, thrift stores wrap heads in used wool, while change accrues in panhandler's pockets. But the hands have nothing to do. You can survive like this, but you can't live.

I’m tired of the numbers, tired of the claims that while the “economy” will soon be back on track, workers won’t feel the change. Of course they won’t; the economy has been defined such that the workers have no place. The claim is a tautology, like saying the desert is dry today or I am thirsty, but there is nothing left to drink.

"Work" can mean toil or slog, but it can also mean creation, opus, oeuvre. It is the latter sense that I feel compelled to protect. The world does not lack for boredom or stupefaction; what we need are not more jobs but more lives, more work that dignifies the people that perform it instead of demeaning them. More days when we are tired because of the work, not tired of it.

Tell me I'm dreaming and this can't be. All right, I'm listening. But I do not believe.

The second definition harks back to the single-room schoolhouse: an anthology of texts used for teaching. Here the term passes from the person doing the reading to the object being read, from reading for its own sake to reading with intent. The image of reading remains, but it becomes focused, purposeful; it becomes work.

The third definition shifts from the object to the machine: a device for reading data. No longer human, the reader becomes mechanical, the texts reduced to ones and zeros. There are no stories, only limitless information, each digit as insignificant as the next.

Somewhere between the second and third definitions lies the feed reader, the delicious account, the “read later” tag, the favored tweets. The device becomes the tool by which we produce the anthology. But whereas the old readers were constrained by what could fit between two covers, the new ones are infinite—they have neither beginning nor end, only the interminable middle, extending out in all directions, too far for the eye to see.

And therein lies the rub: the reader (definition 3) makes demands that the reader (definition 1) cannot meet. We try in vain to keep up, but it's like the tortoise and the hare, if the tortoise was missing three legs and the hare was a comet, streaking towards the outer limits.

The natural response, then, is not to join the race at all. If you've weeded your feed reader lately, you've acknowledged as much. But within definition 2 lies another way: the constraint exists not merely in the amount but in the intent. Instead of asking, how much can I handle? ask what am I learning? Instead of what do I have time for? ask what is the meaning of it all?

Because the meaning isn't going to emerge on it's own—you have to create it. The algorithms and tag searches and bookmarklets will only get you so far; afterwards, it's work only you can do, work the machine has no need for. The reader is your own personal anthology, but you are the editor: you are the sum of its parts.

The kind of reading usually evoked in this complaint—either directly or indirectly—is that of the novel: reading that is all-absorbing, where the world outside the page disappears, and the one within beckons during every waking moment. This is reading on the brink of religion—a deeply blissful state that all readers aspire to, memories of which evoke a nostalgia usually reserved for a first love. I am as enamored as anyone with reading like this, and I sympathize with those who would mourn its passing.

There may be little the screen can do to compete with this kind of reading; many would argue it shouldn't even try—that the nature of the screen prevents it from adopting so singular a purpose. But while reading a novel is a mode of reading often distant from that of reading on screen, it is not the only kind of reading we do on the page. And for the purposes of the complaint, it seems to me the novel is a straw man.

A better comparison would be to align reading on screen with reading an anthology. Both involve a selection of readings—not one text, but many. Both envision a connection among the texts—a constraint that argues for their co-existence; the writers could be from the same region or period, or the texts could explore the same topic, or they could be of the same form (essay, poem, play). And both revel in the excerpt—one act of a play, a chapter from a novel, a few poems from a larger body of work; one rarely reads an anthology cover to cover, but instead dips in here and there—now reading a headnote, now a short selection.

If the novel is the vinyl record, the anthology is the mixtape—it defies escape into any particular work in exchange for seeing the whole of something bigger. The meaning is in the collection—in the composition of distractions—not in any kind of singular reading experience.

That seems to me a better analogy for reading on screen; it captures a process of reading that involves movement—from one writer to another, from the poet to the critic to the playwright and back. The difference being that whereas the printed anthology is composed by someone else, the screen demands the reader be her own editor—the anthology comes together on a whim, infused with a haphazardness that can delight as well as disappoint. But what it lacks in durability, it gains in the capacity to surprise—instead of a clear, well-manicured path, it's a trip down the rabbit hole.

It seems to me this kind of reading can be as engrossing as anything on the page—that in this case, it is not the medium of reading that engenders concentration so much as it is one's interest in the subject. How many times have you searched online for the answer to a question, only to discover that hours have passed, your tea grown cold, the sun much lower on the horizon than when you started? The bias of the book reader looks upon such "reading" as inferior—if he even deigns to call it reading at all, and not surfing or screwing around. But it seems to me the time for such a view is coming to an end—that we are better off if we expand our definition of reading instead of stubbornly diminishing it.

In his introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, Jonathan Lethem carefully outlines his methodology for constructing the anthology, and then swiftly abolishes it:

In gathering these stories, essays, and excerpts I willfully ignored the boundaries of my new genre. There's real science in here, as well as cryptoscience, and reverse amnesia, and one straight-up alcoholic blackout. I followed the higher principal of pleasure, tried to end where I started: with writing I loved and wanted to recommend to someone else. That is to say, you. Let this introduction be a ghostly scrim in front of the stories, then, a vanishing scroll of words like the preamble of backstory before the start of an engrossing movie, or like the rantings of the captive amnesiac in Thomas Disch's "The Squirrel Cage," which vanish into air as they are typed. What good is a genre? Genres should vanish and be forgotten, this one especially—it was made for it. Forget this introduction. Here are some stories. Here's a book.

Here, also, is an image of a book that I would like to hold: that of a collection of readings that are loved, that are gathered up for reasons personal and so peculiar, that when joined become a book—not because of the paper or the binding or the barcode, but because of the pleasure they impart—because, for a time, in this one person's mind, they belong together. Such a book need never be printed to exist. It need only be shared.

As Warburg imagined it, a library was above all an accumulation of associations, each association breeding a new image or text to be associated, until the associations returned the reader to the first page. For Warburg, every library was circular.

The promise of ebooks (or, one promise, anyway), is their inherent connectedness. On a whim or the turn of a phrase, I can leap from Shakespeare to Soyinka, finding similarities that didn't exist before, or else existed but were yet unknown. In exchange for the loss of continuity, I gain a new space for metaphors: no longer within the texts, but between them.

If that's the case, then the promise of an ebook is in the multiplicity of titles, not the single text. And, furthermore, it is in the avenues and alleys that lead from one text to the other—in the official tree-lined roads as well as the dank, handmade tunnels. It's the card catalog—as much as the books themselves—that earn their rescue from the fire.

Aby Warburg's library opened in Hamburg in 1926. In Manguel's telling, Warburg incessantly arranged and rearranged his books, moving titles from shelf to shelf in an attempt to map the paths among them. Visitors spoke of books of literature shelved next to those on geography, art history leaning against philosophy. At one point, unable to move the books at the speed of his mind, Warburg resorted to tacking notecards to a cloth—each card relating a text or image, their placement on the cloth relating them to other texts. The cards could be lifted and moved around at will—a visualization of the ongoing, cacophonous conversation around them.

His was a library as creative act—it exchanged the rigor of a single taxonomy for one that was fluid, eccentric, human. In so doing he delayed the act of finding a text indefinitely. You didn't so much as look for a book as look for the thread that linked it to its neighbor; you didn't rest on a single title, but instead travelled through them all, assured that wherever you were going, you would never arrive.

I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn't the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for reading, we're neglecting methods for shelving. A search engine cannot compete with Warburg's delicate, personal library. The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it's not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek.

This new design maintains the simplicity and readerly layout, while avoiding some of the more awkward quirks of the previous designs. There are more graceful ways to manage clutter and support the reading experience than hiding the navigation on page load. Likewise, a well designed book (read: site) need not open on page 3, but can admit of a cover or table of contents to welcome the reader in. Ergo, the home page now supports browsing before reading.

In addition, I’ve increased the type size considerably. The more I read online, the more I believe larger sizes are more comfortable, especially for reading long form. And the book covers are shown much larger as well—part of a general desire on my part to better communicate how much the physical form of the book remains a part of the reading experience.

Perhaps most significantly, I’ve broken the content into two main sections: Reading and Writing. The former is home to the books in the library and—new to this edition—reading notes. These are short, excerpt-driven notes that aim to record something that struck me while I’m reading. The early months of this site included a lot of writing of this kind, and I’ve missed it as I moved towards the essay form. Here, they return in the context of the books they sprang from. The writing section will be reserved for the kind of long-form writing I’ve done more recently (and which I will be returning to very soon).

I’ve made my feelings about obnoxious advertising on the web clear, but what I did not address was the alternative: simple, attractive ads that do not compete with the content but instead contribute to it. With that said, I’m proud to have joined The Deck—an advertising network that pairs great products and great sites in a manner that respects them both. The member sites represent some of my favorite places on the web, and I’m delighted to be among them.

Still to come: RSS feeds for the reading section, miscellaneous fixes for a certain persnickety browser, and content for the as yet mysteriously empty “work” section, plus more thoughts on the library. Stay tuned.

Update: I've added RSS feeds for the reading section, as well as a combined feed for all the posts on the library.

We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

As I write this, I am baking bread. Or, at least, I am trying to bake bread; I am new at this and so not assured of success. Already the dough does not look like King Arthur Flour says it should; it’s supposed to be too slack to form into a ball, but here I am with a shiny, round, beautiful ball of dough, now rising slowly on my countertop. I keep reviewing the recipe, wondering if perhaps I misread one-half as one-quarter somewhere along the way.

I could, of course, just go buy a loaf of bread. There’s great bread to be had just a few blocks away. But I like the trial and error; I like the effort. I like the slow, Sunday pattern of getting up each hour to deflate and turn the dough, greasing my hands, forgetting to don my apron. It’s the kind of work that is deeply satisfying, even when you don’t succeed. The friendly call from the analog alarm on my stove is a respite from the email and IMs and knocks on my door that will chime every few seconds come morning.

In between checking on the dough, I am reading and (ostensibly, at least) writing. The former comes easier, but that’s how it usually goes. Alberto Manguel’s lovely and perfervid history of reading compares easily to the slow, leisurely process of bread making. Both activities are thousands of years old; both are essential to the human condition.

I’m reading, as I often do, on paper; and while I still think the printed book has more to recommend it than the digital one, I’m also aware of how much time I spend reading on the screen. So much good writing happens on the web these days that my desire to read as much as I can has grown from buying two to three books a week to subscribing to two or three new sites. My feed reader has come to resemble my nightstand, stacked high with books I have yet to attend to.

And yet, those two sights—the stack of books and the unread count in my feed reader—evoke dramatically different responses. To the books, I feel excitement, eagerness; I look forward to the hours I will spend lazily in bed, flipping from one to the other. I dread the unlikely event that I will ever read them all, that I will ever finish a book and not have another ready to turn to that very second. The act of reading is always unfinished, and unapologetically so—within a library, there is no concept of completion.

Yet my feed reader—also always unfinished—evokes within me a dread surpassed only by that most loathsome of places—the inbox. I grow weary as the unread count increases, as it fills up with new articles before I can skim the old ones. In it’s timeliness—most blog posts have short half-lives and so must be read now—and the mathematical precision with which the reader measures its contents, I am stripped of my eagerness to read and filled, instead, with despair. Instead of a thing to enjoy, it makes reading a thing to get done with.

It’s reading made efficient. But I have no lack of efficiency in my life; what I lack is leisure, quiet, and space. The feed reader is the fast food joint of the reading experience, but I want the farmer’s market, the slow-cooked greens, the home-baked bread. I don’t want to feed, I want to eat, with all the attendant history that word evokes—the flavor, the company, the time.

It’s been twenty-four hours since I started this bread making (the recipe called for an overnight pre-ferment), five hours since the dough began to rise, during which I’ve written a few paragraphs and read perhaps a hundred pages. It will be another two hours before the bread is ready to bake, time enough to make some soup and drink some wine. In A History of Reading, Manguel remarks:

It is interesting to note how often a technological development—such as Gutenberg’s—promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance.

He’s speaking of the fact that, in Gutenberg’s time, the printing of books coincided with the ascendance of calligraphy. In our own time, I wonder if the very slowness of books makes them more valuable in the face of all the quickness around us, if their singular nature will prove to be their saving grace. And if so, can that inspire the design of a reading experience on the web that strives for the same lack of haste? Can we envision a future where leisure has its place?