jlevy/on-books

On Books

This is a collection of readings and resources on the past, present, and future of books. The topic is vast, but the idea here is to identify notable and useful books, articles, and resources that relate to every stage of writing and publishing books—and the software, tools, and formats supporting the process.

Items are marked by medium: 📖books, 🗣interviews, 📄articles, 🎥videos, 🎧podcasts. (All in English, for now.)

🚧 This list is far from complete. Please suggest additions to @ojoshe or add a comment here!

History and General

• Wikipedia: History of Books and History of Printing
• 📖 John Man, The Gutenberg Revolution: How Printing Changed the Course of History, 2010.
• 📖 Amaranth Borsuk, The Book (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series), 2018.
• 📖 Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 2011.
• 📖 Andrew Pettegree, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age, 2020.
• 📖 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd Edition, 2012.

Reading

• 📖 Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, How To Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, 1972.
• 📖 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 1975.
• 📖 Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris, 2000.
• 📖 Jon R. Stone, Latin for the Illiterati: A Modern Guide to an Ancient Language, 2nd edition, 2009.

Writing (Nonfiction and General)

• General writing
  • 📖 William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction (30th anniversary edition), 2016.
  • 📖 Jefferson D. Bates, Writing with Precision: How to Write So That You Cannot Possibly Be Misunderstood, 2000.
  • 📖 Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase, 2014.
  • 📖 John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process, 2018.
• Thinking and clarity for writers
  • 📖 Barbara Minto, The Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing and Thinking, 2010.
  • 📖 William Zinsser, Writing to Learn: How to Write—and Think—Clearly About Any Subject at All, 1990.
  • 📖 Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, reprint 2015.
  • 📖 George D. Gopen, The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective, 2004.
  • 📖 Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, 2014.
• Business, legal, and technical writing
  • 📖 Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson, Writing That Works: How to Communicate Effectively In Business
  • 📖 Laura Brown, The Only Business Writing Book You’ll Ever Need, 2019.
  • 📖 Bryan A. Garner, Legal Writing in Plain English: A Text with Exercises, 2nd edition, 2013.
  • Jerry Neumann, two-page summary on business writing
  • Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts, Mathematical Writing, 1987.
• Writing online
  • David Perell, The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online and The Online Writing Roadmap, 2019.
• The full list of Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing has others.

Writing (Fiction and Memoir)

• Novelists on writing (by date)
  • 📖 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, reprint of 1929 edition.
  • 🗣 Ernest Hemingway, Paris Review interview, 1958.
  • 🗣 Doris Lessing, Paris Review interview, 1988.
  • 📖 Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity, 1994.
  • 📖 Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, 1995.
  • 📖 Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, 2003.
  • 📖 Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft, 2010.
  • 📖 Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft: A Twenty-First-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story, 2015.
• 📖 Renni Browne and Dave King, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print, 2nd edition, 2004.
• 📖 Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction, expanded edition, 2008.

Editing

• 📖 Peter Ginna, What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, 2017 — A wonderful survey to understand the many different jobs of editors.
• 📖 Scott Norton, Developmental Editing: A Handbook for Freelancers, Authors, and Publishers, 2011.

Language and Grammar (For Writers and Editors)

• 📖 William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 4th edition.
• 📖 Patricia T. O’Conner, Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English, 3rd edition, 2010.
• 📖 Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications, 3rd edition, 2011.
• 📖 Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, 2019.
• 📖 The Chicago Manual of Style (web and print) — The one and only. A “guiding light for almost all published writing in America today.” (Boston Globe)
• 📖 June Casagrande, The Best Punctuation Book, Period: A Comprehensive Guide for Every Writer, Editor, Student, and Businessperson, 2014 — Most style guides omit some punctuation nuances; this book is the most careful and detailed of its kind.

Book Design and Typography

• 📖 Mark Argetsinger, A Grammar of Typography (more), 2020 — An exceptional, modern, and comprehensive overview of traditional book design and typography, with both historic practice and digital typesetting.
• Book design
  • Wikipedia on book design including the parts of a book.
  • 📖 Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, 2016.
  • 📖 Keith A. Smith, Structure of the Visual Book, 4th edition, 2003
• Typography
  • 📖 Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, 4th edition, 2013 — A definitive and respected modern work.
  • 📖 Alexander Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface, 1990 — A modern survey of type design and type designers for a general audience.
  • 📖 Karen Cheng, Designing Type, 2006 — A detailed, visual survey of actual letterforms, explaining the processes behind creating and designing type.
  • 📖 Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, 1922 — A classic historical survey, now in public domain.
  • Buttrick’s Practical Typography — Likely the best brief, online resource on typography for beginners and practitioners.
  • More readings on graphic design and typography from Theo van Beurden.
• Color and visuals
  • 📖 Josef Albers, Interaction of Color, 50th anniversary edition, 2013 — A classic and definitive work on the use of color.
  • 📖 Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative (1997), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2nd edition, 2001).

Entrepreneurial Advice for Authors

• Advice for authors
  • 📖 Anne Trubek, So You Want to Publish a Book?, 2020 — A concise introduction for authors to the entire publishing process for print books, by a small publisher.
  • 📖 Jane Friedman, The Business of Being a Writer, 2018, and Publishing 101, 2014 (also on her website).
  • Jane Friedman’s resources page.
  • 📖 S.K. Quinn, Indie Author Survival Guide, 2nd edition, 2015.
  • 📖 Writer’s Digest Books, Writer’s Market 2020: The Most Trusted Guide to Getting Published
  • 📖 Writer’s Digest Books, Guide to Literary Agents 2020: The Most Trusted Guide to Getting Published
• Advice for small publishers and self-publishers
  • 📖 Guy Kawasaki, APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book, 2012.
  • 📖 Joe Biel, A People’s Guide to Publishing: Build a Successful, Sustainable, Meaningful Book Business, 2018.
  • 📖 Sean Platt, Johnny B. Truant, Write. Publish. Repeat.: The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success, 2015.

Ebooks

• There are many historic ebook formats but the dominant ones today are Amazon’s Kindle format (which is related to the Mobipocket format) and EPUB.
• 📄 Are ebooks dying or thriving? The answer is yes, 2018.
• 📄 The 2010s were supposed to bring the ebook revolution. It never quite came, 2019.
• 📄 The E-Reader Device Is Dying A Rapid Death, 2020.
• 📄 A short comparison of EPUB vs MOBI for authors

Software Tools and Toolchains

• Writing apps:
  • The classics: MS Word, Google Docs
  • Others: Apple Pages, iA Writer (for Markdown), Scrivener
  • Online collaborative editing (with mobile apps): Notion (good for outlining), Quip
• Formatting languages:
  • Markdown — Now the most widely used format by developers for formatting text, which works well for articles but is not usually expressive enough for writing books.
  • AsciiDoc — Another “human readable” formatting language that’s more expressive than Markdown but also more complex.
  • DocBook — An XML-based formatting language.
  • LaTeX — LaTeX and TeX are among the most mature systems for technical typesetting, widely used in scholarly works since the 1980s; more in 📖 The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX.
• Layout and design:
  • Adobe InDesign — The dominant tool for book design and layout.
• Toolchains:
  • 📄 Scott Chacon, Living the Future of Technical Writing — An overview from a technical author on writing using Git workflows.
  • O’Reilly Atlas toolchain

The Publishing Industry

• Wikipedia:
  • Stages of publishing
  • List of all-time best-selling books
  • ISBN
  • About 60% of English-language books are produced through the “Big Five” publishing houses: Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann), Hachette (Lagardère), HarperCollins (News Corp), Simon & Schuster (National Amusements) and Macmillan (Holtzbrinck)¹
• NPD BookScan — Authoritative POS data, covers 85% of US trade print books sold.
• News
  • Publishers Weekly — Historic and authoritative weekly news source for the international publishing business.
  • Publishers Lunch — Widely read daily newsletter on the publishing industry by Publishers Marketplace.
  • Shelf Awareness — Two newsletters, one for readers (twice a week) one for those in the industry (daily).
• Commentary
  • 📖 The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by Andre Schiffrin, 2001.
  • 📄 Keith Gessen, The Book On Publishing, 2011.
  • 📄 Richard Nash, What Is the Business of Literature?, VQR, Spring 2013.

Current Events

• 📄 Claire Fallon, How The Publishing World Is Staying Afloat During The Pandemic, May 21, 2020.
• 🎧 Peter Goodman, New realities in book publishing in the post-COVID world, May 28, 2020.
• Concepción de León and Elizabeth A. Harris, #PublishingPaidMe and a Day of Action Reveal an Industry Reckoning, June 10, 2020. (Spreadsheet)

The Future

• 📖 Jean-Claude Carriare and Umberto Eco, This Is Not the End of the Book, 2012.
• 📖 Hugh Mcguire, Brian Oleary, Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto: A Collection Of Essays From The Bleeding Edge Of Publishing, 2012 — Available free in several chapters:
  1. The Setup: Approaches to the Digital Present
     • Context, not Container (Brian O’Leary)
     • Distribution Everywhere (Andrew Savikas)
     • What We Can Do With “Books” (Liza Daly)
     • What we Talk About When We Talk About Metadata (Laura Dawson)
     • Analyzing the Business Case for DRM (Kirk Biglione)
     • Tools of the Digital Workflow (Brian O’Leary)
     • Designing Books in the Digital Age (Craig Mod)
  2. The Outlook: What Is Next for the Book?
     • Why the Book and the Internet Will Merge (Hugh McGuire)
     • Web Literature: Publishing on the Social Web (Eli James)
     • Making Books Out of Words (Erin McKean)
     • Why Digital Books Will Become Writable (Terry Jones)
     • Above the Silos: Social Reading in the Age of Mechanical Barriers (Travis Alber & Aaron Miller)
     • User Experience, Reader Experience (Brett Sandusky)
     • App, Meet Book (Ron Martinez)
     • The Curation of Obscurity (Peter Brantley)
     • A Reader’s Bill of Rights (Kassia Krozser)
  3. The Things We Can Do with Books: Projects from the Bleeding Edge
     • Communities of Writers (Jürgen Fauth, Fictionaut)
     • On the Therapist’s Couch: Books as Apps, Really? (Neal Hoskins, WingedChariot)
     • The Engagement Economy (Bobby Gruenewald, YouVersion)
     • How Do Books Get Discovered? (Patrick Brown, Kyusik Chung, and Otis Chandler, Goodreads)
     • The Surprising Power of “Little Data” (Peter Collingridge, Bookseer)
     • Exaggerations and Perversions (Valla Vakili, Small Demons)
     • Pain and Its Alleviation (John Oakes, OR Books)
     • The End of the Public Library (As We Knew It)? (Eli Neiburger, Ann Arbour District Library)
     • Now Is the Time for Experiments (Ian Barker, Symtext)
     • The Forgotten Consumer (Jacob Lewis, Figment)
     • A Conversation That Can’t Be Controlled (Sarah Wendell, Smart Bitches Trashy Books)
• 🎥 Future of Reading Symposium, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2010.
• 📄 Andy Matuschak, Why Books Don’t Work, 2019.

Credits

Items here include suggestions from: Andrew Brookins, Jean-Marc Davril, Erin Frey, Anna Gát, Hope Hackett, Rachel Meier, Anirudh Pai, Justin Seymour, Andy Sparks. Curated by Joshua Levy.

Footnotes

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing#Book_publishing ↩