What’s with the Busy Book Formats?

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What’s with the Busy Book Formats?

By Brad Shorr | September 10, 2007

Kenneth Davis recently wrote about the runaway use of italics and boldface. He got me thinking just how much I miss the days when a book was a book. A recent trend in book publishing is to format the material to look like a Web page. Not good.

“The E Myth Revisited”, by Michael E. Gerber, is a truly exceptional book for entrepreneurs. And thankfully, it’s easy to read, because it looks like this–

“Beyond Buzz”, by Lois Kelly, is another outstanding selection, this time about word-of-mouth marketing. It is, however, a little hard to read, because parts of it look like this–

Text boxes inserted in the middle of a narrative are the book publishing equivalent of interruption marketing. Just when you’re getting into the flow of the writing, you’ve got to stop and decide whether to read the text box now or come back to it. Reading a book shouldn’t be that hard. In addition, the gray background and/or italic type frequently used in these text boxes is none too easy to read.

Am I picking nits here? I don’t think so. Seems to me people read books in linear fashion, starting at the beginning and reading straight through to the end. On the other hand, people read Web sites like pinballs in a pinball machine, skipping around from one area of interest to another.

Books are not Web sites, even books about Web sites.

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3 Responses to “What’s with the Busy Book Formats?”

Olivia Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 8:11 am
I totally agree with you on this, Brad. It slows me down so much when there is so much going on on a page, but I didn’t know how to put it into words!
Niels Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Thank you. What a relief that you picked up on this. I couldn’t agree more with you. What happens, I believe, is that there is a confusion between an idea and information. I saw the same thing happen when I was a college professor. When people spoke to me about online teaching, they focused on information transfer. That is not what teaching is about, as far as I am concerned. It is about developing ideas, in particular, teaching students to develop their own ideas (whether they want to or not). Books are the same for me. A book is about ideas, not about information. Information gets outdated, but ideas remain relevant for a much longer time. And an ideas needs time to develop, if it is worth developing that is.
brad Says:
September 10th, 2007 at 8:53 am
Hi Olivia - if only the publishers would listen. Niels, that’s a great point between information and ideas. I do think that’s why books need to be read in linear fashion, though I never would have thought to express it like that. Perhaps that’s why people bounce around on websites - people generally go to the web for information, not ideas (blogs may be an exception, at least some blogs).