Garbage text.
I went to a party at a friend’s apartment last night. He showed me a book he had recently purchased, a best-selling novel. There is no way I can be charitable about this: it looked like crap. The paper stock was flimsy, rough newsprint. The leading and letterspacing were far too tight, presumably to fit more content on fewer pages. And the margins - what margins?
The novel might have been entertaining, but I shuddered at the idea of enduring over seven hundred pages of that particular design. The whole thing appears to have been produced without much regard for the way that people comfortably read. So even though the book’s designer may know typographic best practices, the cost of paper kept them from being implemented.
This book, with text that can be translated to other contexts without losing its intrinsic value, is a perfect candidate for ebook reading. And it’s not alone: thousands of other books, fiction and non-, work in the same way. This is the precise reason why ebooks are selling so well. Even the Kindle’s typographic issues are forgivable here, as any electronic platform would be a massive improvement on the book I saw last night. It felt like a waste of paper, a renunciation of possibility.
I had 20/12 vision for most of my life, but it degraded steadily when reading went from obligation to habit to obsession. I’d like to think that I have quite a lot more life left in me - and so there’s a lot more text to read. It’s hyperbolic to cast this as a matter of health, some warped kind of lifestyle illness for the hyper-literate, but it hits close to home all the same. In a world where the information we consume - both what and how much of it - increasingly defines our personality and our relationship to others, it becomes even more vital.
The world is demanding better design in piecemeal ways. Complete design novices now gush over how pretty a site or book or cell phone or grocery packaging looks - something that would be unheard of a decade ago. This is partly a matter of identifying with specific brands (and their attendant design aesthetics) in order to signify personality traits, but it’s also a matter of sheer practicality: legible text, typeset better, is easier to communicate. We should demand this of everything that we read.
