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Who’s talking
Art director of Bureau Gorbunov, rector of Bureau Gorbunov Intern School, co‑author of ‘Tips’—Russia’s biggest design knowledge base
I am a designer in my own design bureau that is already 12 years old. We design products and services for clients and use that experience in our own products and educational programs. Thanks to the bureau and my colleagues, I have the happiness to launch my own projects. We create them ourselves and decide what they should be like.
The bureau helps its clients to create new products and services that require a name, logo, visualization, interface, website, packaging, design of paper and electronic publications. We do it altogether to ensure that the client gets an integral system:
One Two Trip—the online ticket service for travellers.
Getwear—the brand, the factory and the customized jeans store.
Envy—the outstanding car rental in Honolulu.
LavishShoestring—the UK‑based store with antique and vintage items for everyday use.
Multiple editorial and user interface design projects for Action, Russia’s biggest trade press publisher. For example, ‘Accounting. Taxes. Law’, a weekly newspaper about taxes and accounting, ‘Glavbukh’, ‘Lawyer’ and ‘Staff’ help systems (in Russian) for accountants, lawyers, and staff department.
We’ve created a new format of digital books and launched our own publishing house. Authors from the bureau have published interactive handbooks on typography, user interface, text editing and project management. I'll tell you how it all started, why we made our books the way we did, what were the principles of their design, what financial results we have achieved and where we are headed in the future.
I’m sure that every designer has a soft spot for paper books. I am no exception and have long dreamed of publishing my own books related to the designer profession.
Paper books mean a lot to me. I think I became a designer thanks to the books. Books which I read in childhood, which I read in school, which I ordered as a design student for tons of money on Amazon.
Paper books made me a designer. So ever since I've started our design bureau, I’ve been dreaming of publishing my own book. And I did—but not in the way I've imagined. Our bureau has published my interactive book on typography and also several other design books. And now my passion for paper books fuels our interactive books.
But before we turn to interactive books, I’ll try to answer a simple question.
Why not just publish paper books?
Three years ago I finished the manuscript of my first book: ‘Typography and layout’, a practical guide with an emphasis on design for the screen. By then I realized that, no matter how much I loved books, I didn’t want to publish them on paper. As an interface designer, I find it much more interesting to deal with digital books. Digital book publishing develops very slowly, so it’s possible to invent, try and do something new.
If we decided to publish paper books, we would have to:
Find money. Publishing a book in some other publishing house means saving on everything and not controlling the result. To publish yourself, you need to find a lot of money or to take a mortgage on your house, like Edward Tufte. But such sacrifices still won’t build the right model of the publishing house. We want to work on books that we consider right and necessary, and invest in more challenging and difficult projects.
Set up logistics. We would have to come up with how to sell books, create our own offline logistics, negotiate with stores. That’s not our way, we create design and educational products. Finally, being web and UI designers, we, most likely, would screw up in offline business.
Accept the loss of connection with the book. After printing, the author is not able to change anything: neither to correct the typo, nor to update the outdated information, nor to add a new chapter.
We realized that bureau has digital design DNA, physical print and logistics are not our trade.
Why e‑books suck and what to do about that
Modern e‑books totally suck. Let’s check out Paul Rand’s ‘Thoughts on Design’ spread:
The сhapter begins on the left side of the spread, the right side continues with correspondent illustrations and captions, without separating them from the body text. The text is flushed left, its right edge is calm and wavy. The left margin is used for footnotes and headlines
The chapter begins on the right side of the spread, on the left hangs a detached illustration from the previous chapter. Illustrations to the first paragraphs did not fit into the spread and moved to the next one. The text is automatically justified and has no hyphenation, resulting in ugly word spacing. Annoying bureaucratic titles run in gray at the top and bottom
No matter how good the original design of the book is, Epub will make it look ugly. Why does this happen? Epub is a shitty format, that’s why.
In fact, Amazon sells the same Epubs on Kindle, and always cheaper than paper books. Digital books are just mechanically exported by publishers and always look like the ugly sister of the beautiful paper book.
iBooks Author is a proprietary Apple format. Books in that format can’t be sold anywhere except iBooks. Apple can stop supporting it anytime, and then your books will turn into a pumpkin—as it happens with older apps in the App Store. To read Apple books, you need an Apple device, and not everyone has one. But shouldn’t the book be the most accessible and durable medium of all?
We believe the new digital book is the web‑based book
I’m sure that digital book should be available on the web in HTML format. That will ensure the widest public access from any place or device. By default, other formats impair the usability of the book, because they reduce its accessibility or bind readers to a specific company.
Advantages of a book in web format:
Doesn’t require iPad or Kindle. HTML format, unlike others, provides maximum accessibility from any place and from any device.
You can actually design it. Over the last five years, HTML has made a great leap forward. At last, we can decently manage the grid, fonts and type baselines.
It’s easy to search. Unlike static formats, a web book can be search indexed, you can link to its fragments.
It’s connected with the author. A web book is easily updated and supplemented.
It’s interactive. So, it’s alive and memorable.
If you can show me an e‑book format that gives me the same control over typography and layout that I can get in a web browser, I’ll consider it. As far as I know, it doesn’t exist
What should the book on the web be like
Let me get this straight: we don’t want to make websites instead of books. To understand what a digital book should be, it’s worth trying to perceive it as an information format, not a physical medium. And only after that, to consider technical limitations and habits of readers.
Typical web document
The main ingredient of web is text: comments, documents, posts and essays. These are pages with short to medium text length. Even so‑called “longreads” are often shorter than an average article in a scientific magazine. Texts of documents and posts are not necessarily linear: they can be split into sections or structured by columns, color areas and sidebars. Each post presents facts and thoughts on a specific topic. Posts and documents are combined into websites.
Book
Book is a format of different level that is good for presenting a whole system of knowledge. Large amount of information affects the way it’s presented. The book is not designed for reading at a single sitting, but for several days or weeks. Therefore, the book should have a structure, reference tools and some mechanisms for gradual assimilation and learning.
Typical web document
The main ingredient of web is text: comments, documents, posts and essays. These are pages with short to medium text length. Even so‑called “longreads” are often shorter than an average article in a scientific magazine. Texts of documents and posts are not necessarily linear: they can be split into sections or structured by columns, color areas and sidebars. Each post presents facts and thoughts on a specific topic. Posts and documents are combined into websites.
Book
Book is a format of different level that is good for presenting a whole system of knowledge. Large amount of information affects the way it’s presented. The book is not designed for reading at a single sitting, but for several days or weeks. Therefore, the book should have a structure, reference tools and some mechanisms for gradual assimilation and learning.
The book is a single object—in a single window
The reader should continously and freely move back and forth through the text. Chapters should not be separated from each other by hyperlinks or other artificial barriers. Returning to the book, the reader should not only continue reading from the same place, but also be able to recall the last few paragraphs, even if they are in the previous chapter. So, the solution is that the digital book should be entirely placed in one window.
The book is in the field of vision
Thinking and perception are inseparably connected to vision. One of the key ideas of Edward Tufte: a person is able to perceive a highly detailed and complex information if its medium is in the person’s field of vision. With the help of visual techniques, guides and cues, our brain can process hundreds of information items in short‑term memory. If a large geographic map stays in front of us, even extending beyond the field of vision, we leave “marks” in our mind while we study its other areas in detail. There is even an expression: “to surf the map”.
Hide the parts of the map, and if the viewer hasn’t learnt it by heart, he’ll lose orientation right away. Tufte criticizes representations in which semantically connected text, illustrations or data tables are divided between pages or screens.
Therefore, controlling what the reader has in sight seems a good design strategy. The designer of a typical scrollable page controls the order of elements, but not their position at the top or bottom of the field of vision. Roughly speaking, only two “anchoring” sides of the field of vision are left under the control of the web page designer: the left and right edges.
Well, so what? Web design has been working with that restriction for twenty years. Yet, what we have here is not the web with documents, but rather a book with its specific use cases. One works with a book as with an integral object, directing reader’s attention to a specific place in the narration—to a unit of meaning.
Book is a sequence of spreads
In a paper book, a unit of meaning is a spread, and it is absolutely irreplaceable. A spread is a specific place that you can easily remember, find and refer to in a conversation: “read the page about the Museum.” Longread can’t do that: the whole longread’s content is somewhere in the middle, except for the beginning and the end. Working with a book, especially technical, is completely different. Just imagine a physics textbook published on a scroll.
But we’re talking about a digital book. We want, first of all, not to repeat the structure of a paper book, but to control all corners and sides of the representation.
People read on the screen, scrolling the text vertically. Web designers have learned to control the corners and sides of the representation by using “sticky” scrolling elements. If desired, any element can be pinned to the top, bottom, any side or corner. Our page spreads work in that manner: an illustration or other object in question can be pinned to the top, sides or bottom.
The book is intended for continuous reading and requires full attention of the reader. Therefore, the spreads of our book entirely occupy the window and the field of vision of the reader. But our page spread is a semantic unit rather than the result of mathematical division of the book into identical “screens.” Text on the spread can be scrolled, when necessary, and the illustrations will retain their position on the screen, or vice versa.
Unlike “sticky” pictures in longreads, our spreads are separated from each other. First, pagination makes it easier to read long text: that is well known for “paper” layout designers. Second, semantic division helps the reader to easily remember the needed place, to return and, of course, refer to it.
Each spread has its unique number and URL, so that the reader could retrieve it from the address bar and use in a hyperlink.
The idea of using page numbers, like in paper books, didn’t appear right away. At first, it seemed to us that it was some kind of a relic of the past. But having spent few months working on the content of the book, we realized that it was just inconvenient for us to refer to typos or specific illustrations. People haven’t invented anything more simple and familiar than the page number. And since we’re comfortable with numbering while working on the book, the readers will be comfortable and accustomed to use it as a handbook or a source. Unlike the meaningless and randomly changing page numbers of e‑books.
Meanwhile, we don’t violate the established habits of reading on the screen. Page spreads go one after the other and form an integral object—the book. Uninterrupted scrolling allows you to view the book from beginning to the end without additional clicks, mouse aiming or other gestures. Paging to right and left as on e‑books is not an option.
Our books
We started publishing with a series of handbooks on typography, user interface, text editing and project management. The authors of the handbooks work in the bureau. Check out how our books are designed:
Typography and layout is Artem Gorbunov's practical guide to typography and layout with an emphasis on design for the screen
Typography and layout is Artem Gorbunov's practical guide to typography and layout with an emphasis on design for the screen
User Interface is Ilya Birman’s interactive handbook on user interface
User Interface is Ilya Birman’s interactive handbook on user interface
Maxim Ilyahov
Nikolay Toverovskiy
We’ve released two more handbooks in this interactive format: on text editing and project management.
Maxim Ilyahov
Nikolay Toverovskiy
We’ve released two more handbooks in this interactive format: on text editing and project management.
We want to publish useful books for readers of different age and profession, to promote digital book publishing and to inspire other authors. In the spring of 2019, we have released the first book not related to design—a practical chess game tutorial.
We want to publish useful books for readers of different age and profession, to promote digital book publishing and to inspire other authors. In the spring of 2019, we have released the first book not related to design—a practical chess game tutorial.
Where is the money Lebowski?
We strive to simplify the development of interactive books. But, after all, such book is much more expensive to create than the paper one. It has one more dimension: pages change in the process of reading, and layout does not break in intermediate states. The book should look equally good in different browsers and on any screens: primarily on the desktop and tablet—devices we started with. Paper publishers don’t have such problems: you print what you’ve designed.
It is simply unrealistic to sell interactive books using the model for selling paper books. No publisher would spend so much effort on books to get a good product. The publisher simply takes what he’s got, clicks the ‘Export to Epub’ button and sales this Epub for half the price of a paper book.
There is one more nuance that needs to be kept in mind if we make web books. Paper books and Epubs are made by “publish and forget” principle, while web books, figuratively speaking, consume electricity on the server, even when nobody reads them. Of course, there is an advantage: a web book can be fixed, updated, supplemented. But if paper book can lie in the attic for several centuries and be read at any time, web book should always be online and requires support.
There is a concept of “sustainability”—the ability of the system for self‑preservation and self‑support. By definition, any business can only exist on the money of its customers. Therefore, the web book should live at least until the last reader.
That’s how we came to the idea of subscription to interactive books. The approximate price of a paper book in Russia is $20. Subscription to our interactive book in Russian also costs $20 for the first three months; then—¢80 per month.
It’s no secret that not all our readers understand us and we get a lot of questions: “I’d better pay for the book once, even if it costs more. I want to own the book forever, name the price.” But there simply can’t be such price for the book: at the extreme, it is infinite.
On the other hand, subscription fuels the creation of new books. Thanks to this model, we can publish what we believe is right and needed, we can invest in more daring and difficult book projects. We can publish the way we want and not save on everything, like in paper publishing.
Author’s share in the paper book for $20
Let’s сalculate how much the author earns from a paper book for hypothetical $20:
The book is sold through the online store, so the payment system charges a сommission of $0.5
The store takes about a half—$10, but it also pays $1 tax to the state, resulting in $9
The publisher earns about a quarter—$4.6, of which $0.6 tax is paid. $4 remains
The printer gets $3.9 for printing copies and pays $0.4 tax. The outcome is $3.5
As a result, the author gets an honestly earned $1 and also pays his taxes—. What’s left is —something about 5% of the cost of the book
Author’s share in the bureau’s interactive book for $20
Our task is to make authors want to be published not only for fame, but also for money. There are less chain links in our book production: we don’t have an external store and printing shop, we sell subscription on our website. Therefore, the author’s share is 30% of the publisher’s total income (not profits!). Let’s have a look at our economy:
The minimum subscription period to our books is three months, so let’s assume that our book in Russian costs $20 without further subscription renewals
Digital publisher earns $13, of which $1 tax is paid. The result is $12—three times more profit than the paper publisher earns
The author earns $6.5, and pays tax. He gets per digital copy, that is almost six times more than for the paper edition
The financial results as of June 2019
Our subscription model works and is interesting for authors, though we have not done advertising yet, but simply announced the books on our website.
Artem Gorbunov’s ‘Typography and layout’ was launched in September 2015. As of June 10, 2019, 3564 people subscribed to it, the book earned $80K.
Ilya Birman’s ‘User Interface’ was published in April 2017. It got 1632 subscribers and earned $32K.
At the end of 2017, we have launched the digital bookshelf named Bureau Gorbunov Handbooks. We’ve put our ‘Typography and Layout,’ ‘User Interface,’ and ‘Information Style’ handbooks together so the readers could save by subscribing to several books at once. In addition, we’ve prepared different offers for switching to the bookshelf for existing readers. Conditions depended on how many books the reader had already subscribed to and how long he had been with us. 1634 people have subscribed and switched to the bookshelf. These figures make me happy because they show that the more books we publish, the more readers are ready to accept our subscription model.
The bureau came up with a fundamentally new format of digital books and a fundamentally new business model. For the time being, no one has dared to sell separate books by subscription, only in bulk. And we are doing well so far.
That’s how much we earned with our first book
The challenges
Still, our publishing house has tasks to solve.
Large‑scale involvement
We need to learn how to make much more books, streamline the publishing process. Just to get the picture—I still personally work on every book with the authors as an editor and art director. In the near future we need to build more efficient production.
Search indexing
We make money from books, so they are password‑protected. We want to be more web‑friendly, so that people could easily find our books in search engines.
Longevity
Many authors write books to leave a mark in history. But web pages don’t live long: browsers change, so one day the layout can break; web sites need hosting and you have to pay for it. Many web sites that were alive ten years ago are no longer there, and digital books won’t be found in the attic after 300 years. This is a serious problem of the web itself, which must be solved one way or another.
Authors
So far, we write the books ourselves, and it seems to be working out quite well. But I wouldn’t like to self‑publish for the rest of my life. Good authors and books are always few.
We do not want to limit ourselves to books about design, so we will publish interesting and useful books for kids, yachtsmen, pool players, teachers and students. Handbooks, comics, manuals, reference books, and who knows, maybe someday we’ll get to encyclopedias. I would be happy if you chose us to publish your book.
Stay tuned
Nikolay Toverovskiy
Managing projects, people, and yourself
Soon
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