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.

It seems to me that if Wikipedia disappeared, similar information would still be available for the most part, but in more contextualized forms, with more visibility for the authors, and with a greater sense of style and presence.

But isn't this a fact of Wikipedia's namesake—the encyclopedia—as well? There's a reason that once you reach high school you are no longer permitted to quote from the encyclopedia: it's an inferior resource. It would be dangerous to forget that.

Whether they are cordial or not, Wikipedians always act out the ideal that the collective is closer to the truth and the individual voice is dispensable.

Elsewhere, Lanier calls this the "one book" philosophy: the idea that all the world's knowledge could be collected into one true book. Which naturally leads to there being no books—and no truths—at all.

The centrality of advertising to the new digital hive economy is absurd, and it is even more absurd that this isn't more generally recognized. The most tiresome claim of the reigning official digital philosophy is that crowds working for free do a better job at some things than paid antediluvian experts. Wikipedia is often given as an example. If that is so—and as I explained, if the conditions are right it sometimes can be—why doesn't the principle dissolve the persistence of advertising as a business?

A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion. If the crowd is so wise, it should be directing each person optimally in choices related to home finance, the whitening of yellow teeth, and the search for a lover. All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies.

One response: part of the purpose of advertising (perhaps the most significant purpose) is to persuade you to purchase things for which you have no need whatsoever. Perhaps the crowd does not guide you towards the best tooth whitener, not because it is unable, but because it rightly sees no need for that.

What computerized analysis of all the country's school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers currently cannot do.

I'll take this a step further: these are things computers should not do. Technology is supposed to improve our lives, not replace them.

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book.…Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan project of cultural digitization. What happens next is important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will only be one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often, you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote the comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like the various medieval empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

Indeed, an author and her publisher have recently defended such mashups as what the kids are doing today, seemingly oblivious to how that statement makes all authors and publishers obsolete.

The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship—very idea of the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new technology.

It's that individual point of view that matters; Wikipedia imposes a single voice on all topics, as if there could be a single, agreed-upon, crowd-sourced view of everything. The problem being that once you attain the god's eye view, you lose your ability to interrogate it; you lose your sense of self.

We have certain work to do for our bread, and that is to be done strenuously; other work to do for our delight, and that is to be done heartily: neither is to be done in halves and shifts, but with a will; and what is not worth this effort is not to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself; but, at all events, the little use it has may well be spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our strength to. It does not become our immortality to take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor to suffer any instruments with which it can dispense, to come between it and the things it rules: and he who would form the creations of his own mind by any other instrument than his own hand, would also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven's angels, to make their music easier. There is dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sensuality enough in human existence, without our turning the few glowing moments of it into mechanism; and since our life must at the best be but a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that broods over the blast of the Furnace, and the rolling of the wheel.

Such are his resources that he does not lend us his words; he gives them to us and he does not take them back.

Which, of course, is what every great writer does; his words are a gift to every reader, and all the readers yet to come.

For the man of genius can only give birth to works which will not die by creating in them the image not of the mortal being that he is, but of the exemplum of mankind he bears within him. His thoughts are in some sense lent to him for his lifetime, of which they are the companions. On his death they return to mankind and instruct it.

I love this: that the words are themselves immortal creatures, coupling with us for a time, until we expire and they leave to teach the world what they've learned. That the words have more agency than we do is reason enough to covet their attention.

The room of balaclavas is a sign that indigenous people are engaging in democracy without its most infection symptom—elections. Rather than sitting in individual air-conditioned offices in front of large portraits of themselves, these democratic officials serve their communities anonymously, with their faces hidden by the masks of the office they have assumed. The ski masks also serve another purpose. They are a reminder that when you visit the Junta, you aren't there to see a particular person—you came to see the people. The masks reveal that the most important face in the room is yours.

Forced to assume the visage of the people, the politicians are unable to forge their own, separate brands. In the heat of Chiapas, the ski masks must also represent the burden that the people place on them.

If "savage" was the magic word for colonialists, "political will" is the fairy dust of today's democracy. When change fails to happen, it is for want of "political will," a sort of magic powder that stirs the powerful to action (even if that action ends up being merely "rinse and repeat"). What contemporary ideas of "political will" betray, more than anything, is our own ambivalence about government. The public at large have more than enough political will for health care, for education, for reduced spending on weapons, or for the environment. It's just that, all too often, the abundant will of government representatives is shaped by a corporate agenda, rather than a popular one.

Or, perhaps, the popular will has been perverted towards other ends:

Park Slope, Brooklyn, is just a microcosm of the slippery slope upon which so many of us are finding themselves these days. We live in a landscape tilted toward a set of behaviors and a way of making choices that go against our own better judgment, as well as our collective self-interest. Instead of collaborating with each other to ensure the best prospects for us all, we pursue short-term advantages over seemingly fixed resources through which we can compete more effectively against one another. In short, instead of acting like people, we act like corporations. When faced with a local mugging, the community of Park Slope first thought to protect its brand instead of its people.

Perhaps when we extended the rights of people to corporations we were really just internalizing the corporate ethos within ourselves; in other words, corporations didn't become people—we became corporations.

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.

Emotional labor is available to all of us, but is rarely exploited as a competitive advantage. We spend the time and energy trying to perfect our craft, but we don't focus on the skills and interactions that will allow us to stand out and become indispensable to our organization.

Emotional labor was originally seen as a bad thing, a drain on the psyche…[but] the alternative is working in a coal mine. The alternative is working in a sweatshop. It's called work because it's difficult, and emotional labor is the work most of us are suited to do. It may be exhausting, but it's valuable.

I see two ways to view the requirement for emotional labor: first, cynically, as a kind of method acting we all play, a performance not unlike the self-conscious ticks of adolescent girls. Or, you could see it more productively as being a better human: as engaging your emotions with others, and expecting theirs in return; as refusing to embrace the role of automaton. I like the sound of that.

As a return on its investment, the federal government got to dictate the basic template for all houses. The FHA used this opportunity to design houses that reinforced the nuclear family while discouraging the congregation of larger groups. The recommended house plans were for four- and five-room Cape cottages. The houses were uniform—intentionally interchangeable. The five models offered at Levittown varied only in color and exterior window arrangement. Variations less expensive to deliver could have been offered, such as rotating the position of the house on its axis, or changing colors and textures in its interior. But this would have defeated the underlying agenda of uniformity; the homogeneity of the houses was supposed to engender a culture of conformity.…

Conformity shouldn't be confused with solidarity. The houses and families within these subdivisions were equal, but separate. The architecture promoted nuclear-family values and gender-based roles for parents. As delivered, there was no room for relatives or even large parties—just the essential activities of a small family. The Cape houses had kitchens in the back, from which moms were to watch kids play in the backyard. In the front yard of the each house were a lawn, landscaping, and four fruit trees to be tended by Dad. As William Levitt himself promised his government patrons, "No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." He meant this quite literally.

I grew up in Dale City, Virginia, a suburb so-named by the housing developer who razed the land in order to build a rash of single-family homes. It was the 80s version of Levittown: a bit more colorful, with sidewalks here and there, and two-car garages if you paid extra. They say the developer named the streets after himself—taking his middle name and repeating it at each intersection, so that you turned from Lindendale Rd onto Silverdale Rd, then onto Ashdale, Surrydale, Cherrydale, Birchdale, Cloverdale, and so on. The bit about it being his name is apocryphal (his middle name was Don, not Dale), but what a falsehood! As if the community was a narcissistic reflection of its maker, as if the people who lived there were driving through his veins.