Matthew Butterick on book thickness and reader attention
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-ryv6TwQvM
- Original title :: Matthew Butterick makes an excellent point about textbook sizes
A clip from Matthew Butterick's talk to documentation writers (original: https://youtu.be/8J6HuvosP0s). He argues that typography — and even the physical size of a book — is about conserving reader attention, the writer's scarcest resource. He contrasts the thin K&R C book with bloated 900–1600-page programming books.
Typography is about attention
- Butterick learned C from K&R in 1994 to write a kerning tool — kerning is the tedious job of adjusting letter pairs, and every type designer hates it.
- He praises K&R as documentation, typography and ergonomics. The most important programming language fits in a wafer-thin book, which signals that C is small, tight and graspable.
- Typography isn't about making things pretty; its function is to conserve reader attention.
- Lawyers, the largest publishing industry in the US, depend on reader attention, and so do documentation writers. Docs don't just explain a tool; they get people interested in it and convey its culture. Once the reader stops paying attention, you've lost.
- He deliberately kept Typography for Lawyers thin, so it would feel manageable rather than "oh god, not typography again".
Bloated books as anti-advertising
- An AppleScript book runs nearly 900 pages. What is there to say about AppleScript that takes 900 pages?
- Programming Python is 1600 pages and Learning Python about 800. "When did you get so fat, Python?" — a terrible advertisement for a language once loved for being lean.
- He blames e-books: on a laptop you never feel how big a book is. He also blames O'Reilly's drift toward huge books.