Together with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria, I am pleased to announce the launch of A Book Apart, a new series of brief books for people who make websites.

Emerging from A List Apart, A Book Apart will serve an audience of designers, developers, and content specialists, with short, practical books from experts in the field. These are topics that are too big for a single essay in A List Apart, but on which few of us have time to read large tomes. By focusing on the key elements within the most important subjects, we aim to release titles whose impact is greater than their page count.

Because a publisher is only as good as its authors, profits from every A Book Apart title will be shared equally between the publisher and the author. We aim to partner with our authors—working together to create the best books we can, and reaping success in tandem.

Our first title is Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers, a succinct introduction to the web’s new markup language, with clear explanation of the new semantics, plus advice on how to use HTML5 now. Zeldman has more to say on why we chose this as our first title, while Jason shares the design process.

I’ll confess two ulterior motives in wanting to publish this book: first, that as a web designer, I needed to know about HTML5 and the mere thought of reading the spec thrust me into despair; second, I knew from reading Jeremy over the years that he was an excellent writer. Thus, the work of editing this book was not only enjoyable, but fruitful: I can now expound on the new semantics with the best of them. And, soon, you can too: preorder your copy now.