Midway through my professional life is a good time to pause and reflect on what fills my days and nights. And it all revolves around books.

My first job as a teenager was in a library shelving books. During college I spent more time in the library than anywhere. My favorite shopping experience always has been in a bookstore. Browsing rows of titles gives me a certain euphoria. Somewhat astonishingly, I get that same feeling when browsing online booksellers.

A short time after college I found myself in library school, which—in fact—had very little to do with books but all to do with information. The container didn’t matter. Within a relatively brief span I went from totally ignorant of computing to fully conversant with the emerging networked world of the early 1990s. Mastering the Unix command-line, perl scripts, and developing websites in vi propelled me towards digital libraries.

Libraries, though, frustrated me. Don’t get me wrong. Libraries are wonderful places to work. But the core of libraries—organizing, digitizing, storing, and retrieving information—left me yearning for more involvement with the actual content. I hungered for how people used the content rather than how they used the metadata. The topic of digital narratives took on a greater appeal. How could the story be told differently through digital media? That’s far outside the scope of librarianship, so after fifteen years I stepped away from the profession.

A romance with an Argentinean led me to Buenos Aires and book design, which formed the genesis of SoroDesign. In the first years our studio dealt primarily with the design of print books. Despite that, a curiosity remained about the shifting nature of narrative in the digital space. Like many, I was skeptical of e-books initially but now I’ve come to embrace e-books. (Please, though, let’s all work on improving the aesthetics of e-book layouts.)

And yet…and yet…there continues a steady question…a consuming passion about the transition from print to digital, especially forms of narratives that are alternatives to 80,000 words of text.

Enhanced e-books leave me lukewarm. Multimedia in the form of apps intrigues me, though I suspect enhanced e-books will morph into Web apps. I fear I talk too much in generalities. It’s time to get specific. That’s the next stage of my career as our world moves from book to tablet.

E-book apps such as Kindle and iBooks provide excellent capabilities for reading long, continuous prose whereas custom apps offer superior mechanisms for presenting narratives that significantly incorporate a range of options, including animation, audio, images, and video as well as new forms of interacting with the book.

When an app serves our purpose most will accept its limitations. We’re seeing that most clearly with all the e-book reading apps. Some people hate iBooks simulated page turning with the faux borders of a print book. Others prefer the more basic approach of the Kindle app. For reading long-form narratives most of us who have embraced e-books tolerate the idiosyncrasies of the Kindle app or iBooks since accessibility and portability far outweigh any disconcerting aspects of reading on a screen.

And that’s the difference between print and digital, and largely now the difference between e-books as apps and as ePub: apps can offer much more than reading on a screen.

The highly acclaimed Our Choice, Push Pop Press’s production of Al Gore’s text, is a remarkable example of how book apps can engage readers in learning about climate change, even offering an animated primer on how electricity is generated for those of us who never quite grasped the origin of electrical currents, underscoring the capability of an animation to convey more meaning than a static image. The static image needs more elaboration whereas the animated image is instantly graspable.

John Gruber properly analyzes the differences between e-books as known via Kindle/iBooks apps and the type of e-book offered up for example by Push Pop Press:

Kindle and iBooks seem to have the goal of reproducing what is possible in paper books. Yes, iBooks supports embedded video and audio content, but it does so in a way that feels as though Apple pondered what it would be like if you could play video on a piece of paper. Push Pop’s concept strikes me as far more ambitious: What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them? E-books that aren’t merely rendered by software, but rather e-books that are software.

It’s easy to see why textbooks will transition to this format and why companies are working to develop educational apps. Textbooks are not at all about reading long-form prose but about absorbing modular content that is carefully constructed to facilitate learning.

While JavaScript-enabled interactivity will emerge for ePub-based e-books and, surely eventually, also for Kindle e-books, those e-books must still be fitted within the constraints of their parent app, e.g., iBooks and Kindle.

The Web browser itself is an app. Web apps already allow us to present content without embedding it inside the visual frame of a browser window. Expect a time when the frame around e-book readers will be removed, too. Over the next couple of years e-book reading apps undoubtedly will edge closer and closer to incorporating a broader set of browser-like capabilities — most importantly full support for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript — so that the design and layout of e-books no longer must exist in the crippled state dictated by today’s iBooks and Kindle apps. But in that case: are e-books of the future anything other than Web apps?

My daughter Mila, born on the second day of this year, will grow up in an era dominated by multi-touch tablets, with ever decreasing thickness and ever increasing capabilities. (Her adulthood likely will be spent with even more flexible devices for consuming information.) Eagerly I will introduce her to reading. Already she hears my voice babbling as I read aloud what she will one day read for herself. Her generation, however, is poised to encounter the stories of the world in manners that are as yet only partially known.

She will come of age in a time when writing is not simply textual (though the careful use of words will persist…must persist). The world of 2030, when Mila is in college, will view one form of writing as a composition elegantly mixing many elements, among which will be words, images, sound, and video. A critical aspect in the coming decades is that the careful use and mixture of those elements must exist.

What do we call these compositions?

Those are not the books we cherish today Those are not e-books. They most definitely are not enhanced e-books. Neither are they documentaries. Technically, the compositions will be contained in some type of app. Maybe they’re just websites. Ultimately, they’re simply stories: narratives for examining the themes that engage civilization, compositions through which we learn and share our experiences of the lives around us.

(And the twenty-first century form of storytelling is as much about the reader as it is about the author.)

A word loosely tossed around these days by media companies is content. Content is often defined by the container. Book necessitates text, perhaps joined by the occasional image. What about other containers? For instance, documentary films necessitate motion images joined with voice-over narration. With the iPad possibilities exist for a hybrid exhibiting capabilities not found in either print or film.

Feeding the reading space of 2030, through whatever magical hardware brand dominates the delivery of digital media, will be apps that are hybrids of books and documentaries.

If we think of the iPad, though, as supporting a new genre then we should step back to examine the whole experience of reading, even asking what is non-fiction? (For the sake of this discussion I leave fiction for another day.) Why do people read and spend time with non-fiction books? Ultimately, I suspect the answer revolves around learning. The desire to learn prompts us to read and, preferably, have an enjoyable experience while doing so. Similarly, that desire to learn in a satisfying manner drives us to view documentaries.

The challenge is in exploring how to leverage the tablet platform for storytelling. The iPad brings a new way of reading. Likewise, it carries forward a new way of writing.

While the publishing community scrambles for today’s solutions, the real burden is on all of us to ensure that tomorrow’s writers & editors understand the elements of style required for creating the publications that will dominate the mid-century. My daughter will be less than forty years of age in 2050. Aspects of the world will be unthinkably different then. Much will remain the same, but the way humans communicate through media will continue its long trajectory. Perhaps what we’re doing now with apps will someday appear as quaint as magic lanterns or the early years of cinema. Undoubtedly, the techniques of writing and composition in a tablet-based digital environment will evolve with time, eventually forming accepted practices that support different types of reading experiences.

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).