Looks like an interesting book. And, on my surface pro, it's pretty. It's not very readable, as it is only dark-on-light, high contrast -- I prefer "night mode" for reading long-form.
And it's unreadable on my Android device (both Firefox and Chrome), due not being a responsive design - the text is simply too small to read. For comparison I've read a handful of books on my Android - both epub and Kindle.
A minimal test of design for reading on the web, should be - how much easier is this to read than the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTOs, or the Debian install guides? If the answer is "it's harder", something's wrong.
(Although, that is a nice idea for a side-project, a simple (set of) stylesheet(s) for LDP/Debian/Plain html documents that adds responsive styling - fonts, choice of light/dark, perhaps CSS columns on a wide screen like the Surface).
It's only readable on my iPhone because it's a 6+, on anything smaller it would be infuriating and it's not ideal for me anyway. Not only that but in 'reader mode' the formatting is completely wrecked such the the content actually disappears. This is all a shame because my preferred way to read something like this is on a mobile device, although I suppose it could be semi-deliberate to nudge you towards buying.
Edit: I was assuming buying would get you an ebook version that would solve the mobile readability issue, but I don't see any mention of that on the 'why I should pay' or 'how to pay' pages. In fact it only mentions the 'web based book you see here'. Exasperating.
For some reason, Butterick is averse to both making a PDF available and to responsive design. Perhaps — as a typographer and book designer — he prefers to control how the layout looks even if it means it looks bad on smaller screens.
From the FAQ:
* Will you ever release this book as a PDF or e-book? No.
* Do you plan to optimize this book for mobile? No.
I could care less for a PDF - but epub is a pretty useful format for actually reading a book. And a Kindle book is also rather nice (mostly due to kindle syncing location in the books across devices etc - I would prefer to buy ebooks without the DRM, as there's the worry one will lose access for various technical or business reasons).
And I'd like an offline copy - I do sometimes read in places without Internet access.
Without any of these - I'd be hard-pressed to buy - even if the content is excellent.
Butterick cares deeply about typography and Amazon doesn't so I can see why he doesn't make a Kindle version. I too buy mostly Kindle books because it's easy to remove the DRM. It's been a while since I looked, but that was more difficult on Apple and Google ebooks.
So he cares deeply about making the book oook beautiful for a specific arbitrary subset of people and doesn't give a crap about that for the set of people that happens to include me. Nice to know.
I don't think the "arbitrary" is justified. It's a group of people who use a platform over which a reasonable amount control over typography and layout can be maintained.
That's not arbitrary if your goal is to create books that conform to a particular standard.
(it's also possible there are technical reasons. The book is written in Pollen, Butterick's publishing system for web-based books. I don't believe it supports output to other formats.)
Actually, turns out the actual chapters have the opposite problem: Too big text, with too big margins and a ragged right that makes it legible, but unreadable. The front page is still too tiny to read...
And it's unreadable on my Android device (both Firefox and Chrome), due not being a responsive design - the text is simply too small to read. For comparison I've read a handful of books on my Android - both epub and Kindle.
A minimal test of design for reading on the web, should be - how much easier is this to read than the Linux Documentation Project's HOWTOs, or the Debian install guides? If the answer is "it's harder", something's wrong.
(Although, that is a nice idea for a side-project, a simple (set of) stylesheet(s) for LDP/Debian/Plain html documents that adds responsive styling - fonts, choice of light/dark, perhaps CSS columns on a wide screen like the Surface).