E-Books as a Blank Canvas

While reading a book yesterday I made an interesting discovery: a chapter that began on a verso (left-side) page. In a standard typeset book, chapters or other major divisions generally begin on a recto (right-side) page, leaving a blank verso if the previous section ended on a recto page. This book followed that standard everywhere else, so I wondered if this was an accidental oversight on the part of the typesetter or if it was a deliberate act that met some other, unknown publishing requirement.

I thought to myself that in an e-book, these distinctions are entirely meaningless. E-book hardware only shows one page at a time. Even the notion of “pages” is abstracted away, as the user re-sizes text on the fly and the entire book re-flows its own layout to match, adding or dropping page numbers as needed.

So are typesetters out of a job? Hardly. A professionally typeset book exudes quality, even if the writing within does not. Until everyone starts writing their books in a system like LaTeX, typesetters will play an important role in adding value to a finished book, online or not. Even with publishing systems like LaTeX, a good typesetter can still make a book stand out in a way that matches the tone and style of its writing. As with anything else in design, the rules exist so that those who have mastered the rules can break them creatively.

I propose that the e-book can serve as a blank canvas on which an entirely new art of typesetting can flourish. What we have currently is a system that creates beautiful printed books and then translates them into e-books in imitation of the original. Where we need to end up is a system for creating beautiful e-books from the beginning, with their own standards and conventions. As e-books become more popular, I think we will see a revolution in how we conceive of the “book” as an object.

For reference, one need only look to the constant evolutions of the video game industry. Whenever a new console cycle begins, developers’ first impulse is to create games that are very similar to what has already been done, only “better”. As the hardware matures and developers become more confident in working with it, entirely new types of games are created that utilize the best features of the new hardware while casting aside gameplay mechanics and practices that no longer make sense. The end result is a set of games that are unique to that generation of consoles and represent the best of an era.

Printed books have had a long run, but a new cycle is beginning, and I’m eagerly waiting for the end results.