Design for Real Life News!

If you’re reading this, odds are you’ve at least heard of A Book Apart (ABA), who published Design for Real Life, which I co-wrote with Sara Wachter-Boettcher back in 2016.  What you may not have heard is that ABA has closed up shop.  There won’t be any more new ABA titles, nor will ABA continue to sell the books in their catalog.

That’s the bad news.  The great news is that ABA has transferred the rights for all of its books to their respective authors! (Not every ex-publisher does this, and not every book contract demands it, so thanks to ABA.) We’re all figuring out what to do with our books, and everyone will make their own choices.  One of the things Sara and I have decided to do is to eventually put the entire text online for free, as a booksite.  That isn’t ready yet, but it should be coming somewhere down the road.

In the meantime, we’ve decided to cut the price of print and e-book copies available through Ingram.  DfRL was the eighteenth book ABA put out, so we’ve decided to make the price of both the print and e-book $18, regardless of whether those dollars are American, Canadian, or Australian.  Also €18 and £18.  Basically, in all five currencies we can define, the price is 18 of those.

…unless you buy it through Apple Books; then it’s 17.99 of every currency, because the system forces us to make it cheaper than the list price and also have the amount end in .99.  Obversely, if you’re buying a copy (or copies) for a library, the price has to be more than the list price and also end in .99, so the library cost is 18.99 currency units.  Yeah, I dunno either.

At any rate, compared to its old price, this is a significant price cut, and in some cases (yes, Australia, we’re looking at you) it’s a huge discount.  Or, at least, it will be at a discount once online shops catch up.  The US-based shops seem to be up to date, and Apple Books as well, but some of the “foreign” (non-U.S.) sources are still at their old prices.  In those cases, maybe wishlist or bookmark or something and keep an eye out for the drop.  We hope it will become global by the end of the week.  And hey, as I write this, a couple of places have the ebook version for like 22% less than our listed price.

So!  If you’ve always thought about buying a copy but never got around to it, now’s a good time to get a great deal.  Ditto if you’ve never heard of the book but it sounds interesting, or you want it in ABA branding, or really for any other reason you have to buy a copy now.

I suppose the real question is, should you buy a copy?  We’ll grant that some parts of it are a little dated, for sure.  But the concepts and approaches we introduced can be seen in a lot of work done even today.  It made significant inroads into government design practices in the UK and elsewhere, for example, and we still hear from people who say it really changed how they think about design and UX.  We’re still very proud of it, and we think anyone who takes the job of serving their users seriously should give it a read.  But then, I guess we would, or else we’d never have written it in the first place.

And that’s the story so far.  I’ll blog again when the freebook is online, and if anything else changes as we go through the process.  Got questions?  Leave a comment or drop me a line.

• Design for Real Life News! was published on Monday, July 22nd, 2024.
• It was assigned to the Web and Writing categories.
• There have been two replies.