As for the writing, totally agree. Non-fiction writers need to adapt to their reader base, and readers these days respond better to things (and writing) that are more interactive (if that makes sense?).

On pagination, Amazon chose an unbelievably stupid system of having this new content pagination system that does not include a translation to other pages. Number are numbers, there should have been no problem getting a translation matrix for each book (content area 120–155 = page 6 of book).

This is a largely unnoticed paradox: reading machines insist equally upon replicating the interface of the pageturn and violating the design integrity of the individual page, by making its content vary according to the font size and style.

Thank you for crystalizing an idea that I’ve been trying to get at obliquely in a number of contexts.

• Attempts to replicate “page turns” in digital contexts don’t work very well, and aren’t authentic to the experience of the screen;
• Scrolling is equally intuitive, already well established with web pages, instapaper, iPhone applications, etc., and IS authentic to the possibilities and actualities of screen reading.

This speaks directly to some of the choices/compromises of reading machines like the Kindle/Nook. This is a largely unnoticed paradox: reading machines insist equally upon replicating the interface of the page turn and violating the design integrity of the individual page, by making its content vary according to the font size and style.

Wouldn’t it be much more elegant to maintain the same pagination from the print to the electronic edition — so that we have, once again, a book that’s stable across platforms — AND maintain whenever possible the same design of individual pages; but still allow the reader to adjust the font size to his/her needs and preferences, by letting them scroll from one page to the next?

I don’t know, maybe that’s just me.

It’s one of the frustrating things about being a writer who primarily works alone — no editorial oversight. Sure, I get praise and approving links, or flames. But even that is mostly about the ideas at hand, rather than the quality of the writing itself.

So instead one pokes around and reads Jakob Nielsen and however many Pro Blogger sites in an effort to learn something. Plus the standbys like The Elements of Style.

I want to break open the black box of magazine writing, too. The magazines I have long admired too often adopt a kind of “angel of history” voice, beweeping our outcast state—a transcendental melancholy that feels not so much inappropriate as unearned.