While I've ventured into different areas of design since then, I've longed to be closer to type, and—in part because of the many hours spent editing for A Book Apart—closer to the words that good type serves.

I've also—and my last post attests to this—come to believe that building relationships with the people who use your product or read your book is the frontline of the design process. A great community allows you to dream big and make mistakes—learning along the way—and still succeed.

As such, I am very excited to be starting today at Typekit as Community and Support Manager. I believe that working with the people who use Typekit everyday may be the best way to learn about what type on the web can really be. And I believe that the work Typekit is doing will make the web not only more beautiful, but more readable. Over a year ago, I wrote in defense of readers on the web; now, I can begin to see a day where no such defense is necessary. That is a day I look forward to.

I think there are two reasons for this: first, most generalist publishers have failed to develop a meaningful brand, thwarted by their own large and all-encompassing lists. As such, their names are interchangeable. I do not recall off the top of my head who published the latest Clay Shirky book, not because I am inattentive, but because it doesn’t matter.

The second reason is that publishers have outsourced their audience. Publishers do not sell to readers directly—they sell to bookstores. It does not behoove Amazon or Barnes&Noble for you to develop a close relationship with the publisher. They want to keep you to themselves; and they have done so by delivering a customer experience that most publishers have neglected.

If publishers are to continue to be relevant, they need to repair both of these errors: first, by publishing lists, not books—meaning, collections of books where each book fits into the list and contributes to a larger story—and second, by cultivating a relationship with their readers. In either case, it helps to be small.

We didn’t set out to number the titles from A Book Apart; it was Jason Santa Maria’s idea to add “No. 1” to the cover when working on the design, so as to make a visual connection to issue numbers on A List Apart. But the more I think about this, the more I think the numbers are paramount to the list: it forces us to think about the way each book leads into and supports the next. We’re not only publishing individual books—we’re telling a story about the web one book at a time.

Moreover, that the first title from A Book Apart has been a raging success is not only due to Jeremy Keith’s excellent (and hilarious) writing, nor to the topic, but to the fact that between A List Apart and An Event Apart, we already had an audience that trusted us and valued what we had to say to the world. I myself learned about the web from A List Apart and feel a special loyalty to it that runs deeper than what my own editorial involvement could ever achieve; likewise, the hours spent meeting and talking to people at An Event Apart have been some of the most rewarding of my career. The seeds of our first title were planted not when Jeremy agreed to write for us, but when Jeffrey started A List Apart more than a decade ago.

Our audience is our most trusted asset, more important than even our authors. (I say this with profound respect for all of our authors, whom I am deeply honored to be working with.) But we couldn’t do justice to the books they write if we didn’t first care greatly for our readers. We could hire a distributor to handle fulfillment and customer support (tasks I’ve spent many an hour on), we could sell to bookstores and let them cultivate a community for us, but then we’d be abandoning our readers right at the moment when they are seeking us out.

Over the past few months, I’ve responded to readers who were frustrated that the book didn’t arrive fast enough, or annoyed at having received a damaged book; I’ve also read many heartwarming notes from people whose understanding of the web changed because of this one little book, or whose initial disappointment at its slimness turned to delight once they started reading. I’ve watched as the orders came in from Florida to Fiji, from libraries to military bases. One man sent us a photo of himself reading the book on his fishing boat; another sent a photo of his toddler flipping through the pages—he called it “the future.”

We could have outsourced the time it took to read and answer all of these emails; but then we’d be missing out on the most important part of this little business: you. Looking back, I can’t believe I spent a decade in publishing without this connection; I can’t believe any publisher who doesn’t take this seriously can make it. At SXSW last year, Paul Ford called the web a platform more suited to customer service than publishing; I didn’t entirely agree with him when he said that (I still don’t), but I’m coming around. One reader at a time.

I assumed that the producer and I would jump into a conversation about social construction of knowledge, the nature of authority, or any of the other topics that Wikipedia often generates. She didn't ask any of these questions, though. Instead, she sighed and said, "Where do people find the time?" Hearing this, I snapped, and said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from." She knew, because she worked in the industry that had been burning off the lion's share of our free time for the last fifty years.

This is the core of Shirky's argument (and perhaps my favorite passage in the book): whereas we used to spend hours a day passively watching the tube, now we spend our time editing Wikipedia articles and creating lolcats for every occasion. In a vacuum those acts may seem trivial; but the collective consequences can be vast (witness the open-source software movement). Moreover, even a silly act like crafting the perfect title to place above the photo of an obese cat is more creative—and more productive, more satisfying—than merely watching Seinfeld. The lolcat is more evolved than the sitcom.

Unschooling is a movement based on the ideas developed by an educational reformer named John Holt, who died in 1985. In 1981, he told a reporter, "It's not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It's a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life."

Pat Ferenga, who is carrying on Holt's work, describes unschooling as "…the way we learn before going to school and the way we learn when we leave school and enter the world of work."

Which perhaps says more about how we've defined "school" than anything else. The best schools are less a place than a state of mind.

The real issue is not whether baking biscuits is meaningful, but the extent to which the activity can seem so after it has been continuously stretched and subdivided across five thousand lives and half a dozen different manufacturing sites. An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others.

So, take an activity—say, cooking, which may be one of the most natural, human things we can do for one another—and break it up into a thousand pieces and you'll find yourself with a dreary workforce and inferior biscuits. That we ever got to this point, when it is so clearly a source of despair, is astonishing. Further proof that we need an economy built not to maximize profits but to improve the quality of human life.

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

The natural result of such a state is that the people who labor to produce these items remain as obscure to the world—and so, as defenseless—as are the means by which they toil. But it needn't be this way.

When an object of design is long lasting, it has two concurrent effects: first, we gain a respect for its stability and persistence. It becomes like an old friend, something we can count on. A sturdy chair, a comfortable knife, a well-bound book—all impress upon us a lasting sense of security—a pleasant stubbornness—in the face of the ever-ticking clock.

Second, when we spend time with an object, it takes on the mark of use and so becomes evidence of our existence. The wear on the chair’s arm where your elbow rests, the nick in the knife’s blade from when you tried to butcher a leg of lamb, the phone number of your future lover hastily scrawled in the back of the book. By these means, a good design grants a bit of immortality with every use.

This, I think, is at the heart of Rams' statement that good design is long lasting. When we think of objects that last a "long time," we think of those that we inherit from our grandparents, or those that we hope one day to pass on to our children’s children. In other words, long-lasting design is design that lives past the end of our own lives, a gift at the edge of an imagined future.

But what of pixels, or bits and bytes? If I died tomorrow, I can confidently assume that the books on my shelves will last a hundred years. But the files on my laptop—where I’m typing these words right now—won’t survive more than a year or two. The words I’ve blogged not much longer than that; the drives they live on will fail, or else the space I’m no longer paying for will be filled by someone else.

Does this mean they are inferior? Perhaps. But, perhaps instead long lasting can now be measured not only in years, but in minds—not in how long an object persists, but in how many people it changes. A book that is read by millions but vanishes in the span of a decade does more good than one that sits untouched for millennia. Speaking of the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, Borges said, “If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for everyone.” Meaning, nothing lasts forever, but some things last long enough.

Sometimes thinkers make their greatest discoveries while appreciating and interpreting the genius of others. It is as though, in the very process of doing justice to the superiority of another individual, we awaken something superior in ourselves.

Of course, one could argue that such interpretation should be done at a distance, lest our own superiority drown in another's.

Emerging from A List Apart, A Book Apart will serve an audience of designers, developers, and content specialists, with short, practical books from experts in the field. These are topics that are too big for a single essay in A List Apart, but on which few of us have time to read large tomes. By focusing on the key elements within the most important subjects, we aim to release titles whose impact is greater than their page count.

Because a publisher is only as good as its authors, profits from every A Book Apart title will be shared equally between the publisher and the author. We aim to partner with our authors—working together to create the best books we can, and reaping success in tandem.

Our first title is Jeremy Keith's HTML5 for Web Designers, a succinct introduction to the web's new markup language, with clear explanation of the new semantics, plus advice on how to use HTML5 now. Zeldman has more to say on why we chose this as our first title, while Jason shares the design process.

I'll confess two ulterior motives in wanting to publish this book: first, that as a web designer, I needed to know about HTML5 and the mere thought of reading the spec thrust me into despair; second, I knew from reading Jeremy over the years that he was an excellent writer. Thus, the work of editing this book was not only enjoyable, but fruitful: I can now expound on the new semantics with the best of them. And, soon, you can too: preorder your copy now.

But I said pen and not pencil for a reason; a pencil mark will fade with time, so that ten years or more from now you won’t be able to read it. (I say this with experience: all the notes carefully recorded in my Riverside Shakespeare as an undergrad are now but blurry smudges, nary a word of it readable.) More importantly, pencil can be erased, while a pen requires that you cross it out. This is how it should be. You do not erase a thought you had; you can only discard it. The fact of its existence remains after it is tossed away. So it is with ink.

Of course, you can’t take your pen to the screen. When it comes to annotating the written word, nothing yet created for the screen compares to the immediacy and simplicity of a pen on paper. The only effective way to respond to text on screen is to write about it. The keyboard stands in for the pen; but it demands more than a mere underline or asterisk in the margin. It demands that you write.

That, of course, was the reason for the pen all along: it’s a physical reminder that you are not reading merely to consume the words of others passively, but that you have an obligation to respond. If the democratization of publishing is to reap any rewards, it can only do so if we all become better writers. The first step towards that is to assume the stance of a writer—to read others’ words with an eye to improving your own. First, you must pick up the pen.

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.