I love this meditation and exploration on web-books:

Existing e‑books stand far from high standards of paper book publishing. Typography is poor, navigation and search are inconvenient. I present my vision of the future of books realized in bureau’s interactive books on design, which we publish and sell using in‑house technology and subscription business model. I will show live demo of our books and share actual sales numbers.

Remind me of the stuff Craig Mod was writing a decade ago…

As I stated before, we will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.

This is not what matters. Surface is secondary.

The ditch digging,
the setting of steel,
the pouring of concrete for the foundation of the future book.
This is what requires our efforts.

Clearly defined scope of these systems,
clearly defined open protocols.
These are what require our discussion.

Tools with simple, quiet, clean interfaces
organically surfacing our changing relationship with text.
These are what we need to build.

All of these efforts combined, these systems integrated,
these tools made well and deliberately.
This is the future book.
Our platform for post-artifact books and publishing.

We still haven’t solved all of this but I love thinking about the future of the book. Especially the practical notions of how to make both web and print books in 2022 (a pragmatic concern for me!)…..

More soon