It strikes me that one of the touchstones of conventional publishing, and much of the reason for the powerful relationships readers have with their literature collections is the tactile, familiar nature of physical books.

Is it the case though, that this tactile nature extends to the layout and design of the text itself, as opposed to the three dimensional aspects of the book? Re-flowable text, as on the Web, is becoming less frustrating as a reading medium for extended content as software catches up to the needs of readers - bookmarking, annotations and suchlike no longer present the problems they once did. Craig Mod, a book designer, today presented his take on why the iPad may be the first device able to correctly represent what he calls 'definite content', that which is not intended to be dynamically re-flowed across an arbitrary screen/page size. It's well worth a read, though I don't know if there's anything particularly special about the iPad apart from its combination of screen size and Apple 'reality distortion field'.

A List Apart, the respected online web design magazine, has also been weighing in on the subject of eBook standards. Yesterday it published an excellent assessment of the relationship between web standards and eBook design. It turns out that as the Web has become more semantic, and as style has become (rightly) functionally separated from content, Web standards have increasingly become the natural choice for eBook layout. The popular ePub format is based on XHTML 1.1, with a restricted set of options so as to enable simple re-flowing of content.

As Mod points out, fiction authors do not usually consider layout in detail when writing their prose. Perhaps this will change in the eBook age, since authors may move beyond the traditional limitations of plain text to incorporate new semantic features like the ability to jump back and forward at will?