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Not only about readability in treebooks, Jon, also a matter of saving the cost of the extra pages that would be necessary to lay out text with paragraph breaks.
In ebook, of course, layout space is not a consideration.
You may have noticed some recent non-fiction treebooks laid out to what's fast becoming standard ebook style. It's effective, but I don't think it would work for straight novels. Also it wouldn't be necessary. At least not yet. It's gonna take a shift in reader preference.
The current print standard (no indent on first line of a chapter or chapter section, following first paragraph lines consistently indented, no extra line breaks) was arrived at after a lengthy period of trial and error by publishers over a century or more. It's pretty well perfect, I think, and readers are used to it.
My own wee house still uses this layout for presentation of novels in ebook as well as treebook, though -- just now branching into non-fiction ebook-only deals -- we're using the new ebook standard of no idents and line breaks between pars.
Time and a few years' more experience on the part of readers and publishers will tell if this is a more practical form for novels, too. The beauty of ebooks, of course, is that it's pretty simple and none too costly to adjust to trend. Print's another matter entirely.
Cheers. Neil
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