Hugh McGuire at The Book Oven Blog brings up an intriguing point that I hadn’t considered previously:

eBooks, and digital devices are a different medium, they call for a whole new design approach. The constraints are different, the reader’s needs different, and so how you’ll design a text is going to be different. I was shocked that with the iPod, the small screen actually seems to me an *advantage* over the paper book in some ways. And so where Kindle & Sony Reader have tried to reinvent the book in electronic form, using the same kinds of design principles, the ereaders on the iPhone/iPod have instead tried to build a new kind of design/interaction standard into existing constraints of devices people already have.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of effects the rapidly growing readership of ebooks and the medium itself will have on writing.  Will books or paragraphs or sentences become shorter on average?  Might we see the resurgence of the novella?  Or will there be little or no effect at all?  I’ll have a post next week on how writers might effectively tailor their books for a world in which more books are read on ebook readers and, just as importantly, a world in which far more books are published due to the relative ease of ebook publication.

Hugh goes on to point to a new open-access electronic journal launched by graduate students at the University of Toronto’s iSchool, Scroll: Essays on the Design of Electronic Text.

Yes, lots of people are thinking about this.