Katie Peek over at A Canary in the Data Mine: Explorations of Data Analysis and Information Display blog posted an interview with me on the topic of book design and the changing world of electronic publishing.

Everyone wants an engaging book. Creating that engaging book is never a solitary endeavor.

Fiction narratives in print are generally all about text, unless it’s a graphic novel, a children’s book, or a novel by Sebald. (Actually, we recently did the illustrations for a work of literary fiction to be published by Holt in June 2010, but that’s another post). In designing a book of fiction, the book designer’s job is to present the text on the page in a way that is highly readable and without interrupting the reader’s experience of the story, or, in John Gardner’s words, “a vivid and continuous dream”.

But non-fiction almost always benefits from making the narrative more visual. Absent the hands of an extraordinary writer, non-fiction books often transport the reader not into a glorious dream but to a snoozefest (where the dream is probably something other than the book).

Making the narrative more visual doesn’t necessarily mean the use of images. It’s also about the use of white space & visualizing blocks of text on a page. (You’ll notice that writing for the Web is about much the same thing). Of course, decisions about chapter lengths, section sizes, etc., are the domain of the writer & editor, but book designers have a lot of latitude in how to present the text.

A friend recently gave us a set of three great books by Edward Tufte that came out in the 1990s: Envisioning Information, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, & Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

Tufte gets to the heart of what book design is all about without talking specifically about book design: the arrangement of information on the page (or, increasingly, the screen as in the case of e-books).

The end of year approaches, bringing that time to reflect on what it’s all about.

It’s easy to let the production aspects of any job overwhelm your daily work, whether it’s the deadline of completing tasks to deliver a book on time, mastering a particularly challenging feature of InDesign, selecting the best typeface for a specific project, or devising an attractive layout that presents the information on the page in an engaging manner. These are all elements that comprise the day-to-day occupation of a book designer.

Ultimately, our greatest satisfaction in designing books doesn’t come from any one activity. It’s all about the whole thing: the book, obviously. But it’s not about holding the book in our hands, viewing our design. For us, it’s all about providing the author with a superbly designed book, a book that the author loves, a book that brings the author’s vision and words to life on the page.

We’re thankful to our great clients who give us the opportunity everyday to design books.

It’s fun to watch the birth of a brand new blog, and a promising new blog is Kristin Lawrence on scholarly publishing.

In a post titled on text taking precedence, she writes

Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics.

This reminds me a lot of my days in academic libraries. But over the last few years I’ve come to a rather opposite conclusion. For 15 years I specialized in digital libraries, which primarily is focused on content and search retrieval.

After a move to South America I got involved with book design. For so long I tried to convince myself that the text-takes-precedence model had to work since, after all, that was the basis of everything I valued in developing digital libraries. But I always felt that something was missing and that was largely the aesthetics of digital content.

Most people involved in developing digital libraries and scholarly publishing are programmers, project managers, and administrators. Occasionally, someone in that crew will have learned a few things about Photoshop and labeled himself a graphic designer.

(And I will be the first to admit that I am no graphic designer but I do work with one).

If the future of publishing scholarly monographs is to store the content in XML and generate end-products in various formats via styles sheets, then it’s imperative that those involved in scholarly publishing connect with those who can bring quality design to those style sheets.

These days there are a ton of professional designers well versed in crafting great designs with style sheets. It can be done and it’s vital that individuals within the scholarly community don’t let programmers and administrators convince them that aesthetics does not matter.